ar (Unix)

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ar
[[Programmer|Original authorTemplate:Pluralize from text]]Ken Thompson,
Dennis Ritchie
(AT&T Bell Laboratories)
[[Programmer|DeveloperTemplate:Pluralize from text]]Various open-source and commercial developers
Initial releaseNovember 3, 1971; 54 years ago (1971-11-03)
Template:Infobox software/simple
Written inC
Operating systemUnix, Unix-like, V, Plan 9, Inferno
PlatformCross-platform
TypeCommand
LicensePlan 9: MIT License
WebsiteScript error: No such module "WikidataIB".

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archiver format
Filename extensionTemplate:Monodiv
Internet media typeTemplate:Monodiv
Magic numberTemplate:Tt
Type of formatarchive format
Container forusually object files (Template:Tt)
StandardNot standardized, several variants exist
Open format?Yes[2]

ar, short for archiver, is a shell command for maintaining multiple files as a single archive file (i.e. a file archiver). It is often used to create and update static library files that the link editor or linker uses and for generating deb format packages for the Debian Linux distribution. It can be used to create archives for any purpose, but has been largely replaced by tar for purposes other than static libraries.[3]

Originally developed for Unix, the command is widely available on Unix-based systems, and similar commands are available on other platforms. An implementation is included in GNU Binutils.[2]

File format

File:Deb File Structure.svg
Diagram showing an example file structure of a .deb file

The format of a file that results from using ar has never been standardized.[4][5]

The first format appeared in the first edition of Unix[6] and was used through Version 6 Unix.[7][4] Version 7 Unix had a modified version of that format,[8][4] which was also used in UNIX System III[9] and in UNIX System V on the PDP-11.[10]

A new format was introduced in the first release of System V on processors other than PDP-11s.[11]

Modern archives are, on most systems, based on a common format with two main variants, BSD[4] (initially used for a.out files) and UNIX System V release 2 and later[12] (initially used for COFF files and later used for ELF files) and used as well by GNU[13] and Windows. AIX has its own formats (small[14] and big[15]), as does Coherent; those formats vary significantly from the common format.

Structure

An archive file begins with a header that identifies the file type and is followed with a section for each contained file. Each contained file section consists of a header followed by the file content. The headers consist solely of printable ASCII characters and line feeds. In fact, an archive containing only text files is also a text file.

The content of a contained file begins on an even byte boundary. A newline is inserted between files as padding, if necessary. Nevertheless, the size stored reflects the size excluding padding.[16]

Archive header

The first header, a.k.a. file signature, is a magic number that encodes the ASCII string !<arch> followed by a single line feed character (0x0A).

Contained file header

Each file is preceded by a header that contains information about the file. The common format is as follows. Numeric values are encoded in ASCII and all values are right-padded with spaces (0x20).

Offset Length Content Format
0 16 File identifier ASCII
16 12 File modification timestamp (in seconds) Decimal
28 6 Owner ID Decimal
34 6 Group ID Decimal
40 8 File mode (type and permission) Octal
48 10 File size in bytes Decimal
58 2 Ending characters 0x60 0x0A

Variants

Variants of the command were developed to address issues including:

File name length limitation
The BSD and System V/GNU variants devised different methods of storing long file names.
Global symbol table
Many implementations include a global symbol table (a.k.a. armap, directory or index) for fast linking without needing to scan the whole archive for a symbol. POSIX recognizes this feature, and requires implementations to have an -s option for updating it. Most implementations put it at the first file entry.[17]
Year 2038 problem
Although the common format is not at risk of this problem, many implementations are vulnerable to failure in that year.

BSD

The BSD implementation stores file names right-padded with ASCII spaces. This causes issues with spaces inside file names.[<span title="Script error: No such module "decodeEncode".">clarification needed] The 4.4BSD implementation stores extended file names[<span title="Script error: No such module "decodeEncode".">clarification needed] by placing the string "#1/" followed by the file name length in the file name field, and storing the real file name in front of the data section.[4]

The BSD implementation traditionally does not handle the building of a global symbol lookup table, and delegates this task to a separate utility, ranlib,[18] which inserts an architecture-specific[<span title="Script error: No such module "decodeEncode".">clarification needed] file named __.SYMDEF as first archive member.[19] Some descendants put a space and "SORTED" after the name to indicate a sorted version.[20] A 64-bit variant called __.SYMDEF_64 exists on Darwin.

To conform to POSIX, newer BSD implementations support the -s option instead of ranlib. FreeBSD in particular ditched the SYMDEF table format and embraced the System V style table.[21]

System V/GNU[<span title="Script error: No such module "decodeEncode".">clarification needed]

To allow spaces in file names, the System V implementation uses a slash ('/') to mark the end of the file. This limits the file name to 15 chars. Filenames longer than 15 ASCII chars are replaced by an index, represented by a slash ('/') followed by the decimal character offset in the indexfile of the start or the name. The index file is named "//" and is usually the second entry of the archive, after the symbol table which always is the first. The format of this "//" file itself is simply a list of the long file names, separated by one or more LF characters. LF characters cannot be part of a filename. The GNU version uses '/'-terminated names and no LF.

The System V implementation uses the special file name "/" to denote that the following data entry contains a symbol lookup table, which is used in ar libraries[<span title="Script error: No such module "decodeEncode".">clarification needed] to speed up access. This symbol table is built in three parts which are recorded together as contiguous data.

  1. A 32-bit big endian integer, giving the number of entries in the table.
  2. A set of 32-bit big endian integers. One for each symbol, recording the position within the archive of the header for the file containing this symbol.
  3. A set of Zero-terminated strings. Each is a symbol name, and occurs in the same order as the list of positions in part 2.

Some System V systems do not use this format. For operating systems such as HP-UX 11.0, this information is stored in a data structure based on the SOM file format.

The special file "/" is not terminated with a specific sequence; the end is assumed once the last symbol name has been read.[<span title="Script error: No such module "decodeEncode".">clarification needed]

To overcome the 4 GiB file size limit[<span title="Script error: No such module "decodeEncode".">clarification needed] some operating system like Solaris 11.2 and GNU use a variant lookup table. Instead of 32-bit integers, 64-bit integers are used in the symbol lookup tables. The string "/SYM64/" instead "/" is used as identifier for this table[22]

Windows

The Windows (PE/COFF) variant is based on the SysV/GNU variant. The first entry "/" has the same layout as the SysV/GNU symbol table. The second entry is another "/", a Microsoft extension that stores an extended symbol cross-reference table. This one is sorted and uses little-endian integers.[5][23] The third entry is the optional "//" long name data as in SysV/GNU.[24]

Thin archive

The GNU binutils and Elfutils implementations have an additional "thin archive" format with the magic number !<thin>. A thin archive only contains a symbol table and references to the file. The file format is essentially a System V format archive where every file is stored without the data sections. Every file name is stored as a "long" file name and they are to be resolved as if they were symbolic links.[25]

Examples

The following command creates an archive Template:Tt with object files Template:Tt, Template:Tt, Template:Tt: 

ar rcs libclass.a class1.o class2.o class3.o

The linker ld can read object code from an archive file. The following example shows how the archive Template:Tt (specified as Template:Tt) is linked with the object code of Template:Tt. 

ld main.o -lclass

See also

References

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  1. ^ a b Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."application/x-archive". Archived from the original on 2019-12-08. Retrieved 2019-03-11.
  2. ^ a b Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."ar(1) – Linux man page". Archived from the original on 12 February 2019. Retrieved 3 October 2013.
  3. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Static Libraries". TLDP. Archived from the original on 3 July 2013. Retrieved 3 October 2013.
  4. ^ a b c d e Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Manual page for NET/2 ar file format". Archived from the original on 2017-08-22. Retrieved 2014-08-23.
  5. ^ a b Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Levine, John R. (2000) [October 1999]. "Chapter 6: Libraries". Linkers and Loaders. The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Software Engineering and Programming (1 ed.). San Francisco, USA: Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN 1-55860-496-0. OCLC 42413382. Retrieved 2020-01-12.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link) Code: [1][2][dead link] Errata: [3]
  6. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."archive(5) - Unix First Edition Manual Page". Archived from the original on 2025-06-10. Retrieved 2025-11-14.
  7. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."archive page from Section 5 of the unix-6th manual". Archived from the original on 2025-06-10. Retrieved 2025-11-14.
  8. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."V7/usr/include/ar.h". Archived from the original on 2025-12-30. Retrieved 2025-11-14.
  9. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Unix User's Manual, Release 3.0 (PDF). Bell Laboratories. June 1980. AR(5). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2025-11-02. Retrieved 2025-11-14.
  10. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.User's Manual, System V (PDF). Western Electric. January 1983. AR(4) (PDP-11 only). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2026-01-07. Retrieved 2025-11-14.
  11. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.User's Manual, System V (PDF). Western Electric. January 1983. AR(4) (not on PDP-11). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2026-01-07. Retrieved 2025-11-14.
  12. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.UNIX System V Programmer Reference Manual DEC Processors (PDF). AT&T Technogies. April 1984. AR(4) (not on PDP-11). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2026-01-07. Retrieved 2025-11-14.
  13. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."binutils ar.h".
  14. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."ar File Format (Small)". IBM. Archived from the original on 2025-06-13. Retrieved 2025-08-21.
  15. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."ar File Format (Big)". IBM.
  16. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."ar.h". www.unix.com. The UNIX and Linux Forums.
  17. ^ Template:Man
  18. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Manual page for NET/2 ranlib utility". Archived from the original on 2021-02-26. Retrieved 2014-08-23.
  19. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Manual page for NET/2 ranlib file format". Archived from the original on 2021-02-25. Retrieved 2014-08-23.
  20. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Libc/include/ranlib.h at Libc-320 - apple-oss-distributions/Libc". Github. Retrieved 2020-02-10.
  21. ^ Template:Man
  22. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."ar.h(3HEAD)". docs.oracle.com. Oracle Corporation. 11 November 2014. Archived from the original on 3 March 2021. Retrieved 14 November 2018.
  23. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Pietrek, Matt (April 1998), "Under The Hood", Microsoft Systems Journal, archived from the original on 2007-06-24, retrieved 2014-08-23
  24. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."llvm-mirror/llvm: archive.cpp (format detection)". GitHub. Archived from the original on 28 February 2021. Retrieved 10 February 2020.
  25. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."ar". GNU Binary Utilities. Archived from the original on 2021-04-18. Retrieved 2020-06-29.

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The Wikibook Guide to Unix has a page on the topic of: Commands

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