ar.1 (2010 09)

ar(1) ar(1)

where the single quote marks indicate updated ﬁles. The ﬁrst command says "move

f2 and f3 after f1

in newlib .a", thus creating the order:

f1 f3 f2 f4

Note that the relative order of f2 and

f3 has not changed. The second command says "move f3 after f2

in newlib.a", creating the order:

f1 f2 f3 f4

The third command then replaces ﬁles f2

and f3. Since ﬁles f2 and f3 both already existed in the

archive, this sequence of commands could not be simply replaced by:

ar ra f1 newlib.a f2 f3

because the previous position and relative order of

f2 and f3 in the archive are preserved (no matter

how the ﬁles are speciﬁed on the command line), producing the following archive:

newlib.a: f3’ f2’ f1 f4

WARNINGS

If you are a user who has appropriate privileges,

ar can alter any archive ﬁle, even if it is write-

protected.

If the same ﬁle is mentioned twice in an argument list, it might be put in the archive twice.

If multiple copies of a ﬁle exist in an archive,

ar matches the ﬁrst occurrence of the ﬁle in the archive.

ar automatically creates an archive symbol table, a task performed in early HP-UX versions by

ranlib.

Use of the

z modiﬁer either suppresses generation of the symbol table, or invalidates it if it exists. The

ranlib command can be used to rebuild the symbol table if an archive was built with the

z modiﬁer.

FILES

/var/tmp/ar* Temporary ﬁles