Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. The BFD, or Binary File Descriptor library, is the GNU Project's main mechanism for the portable manipulation of object files in a variety of formats. As of 2003[update], it supports approximately 50 file formats for some 25 processor architectures. BFD works by presenting a common abstract view of object files. An object file has a "header" with descriptive info; a variable number of "sections" that each have a name, some attributes, and a block of data; a symbol table; relocation entries; and so forth. Internally, BFD translates the data from the abstract view into the details of the bit/byte layout required by the target processor and file format. Its key services include handling byte order differences, such as between a little-endian host and big-endian target, correct conversion between 32-bit and 64-bit data, and details of address arithmetic specified by relocation entries.

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