Finding unwanted global variables and functions with dwarves

The dwarves package contains a set of useful tools that use the DWARF information placed in the ELF binaries by the compiler. Utilities in the dwarves package include:

pahole: This will find alignment holes in structs and classes in languages such as C/C++.  With careful repacking one can achieve better cache hits.  I could have done with this when optimising some code a few years back...

codiff:  This is a diff like tool use to compare the effect a change in source code can create on the compiled code.

pfunct:  This displays information about functions, inlines, goto labels, function size, number of variables and much more.

pdwtags: A DWARF information pretty-printer.

pglobal:  Dump out global symbols.

prefcnt:  A DWARF tags usage count.

dtagnames: Will lists tag names.

So, using pglobal, I was able to quickly check which variables I had made global (or accidentally not made them static!) on some code that I was developing as follows:

pglobal -v progname

and the same for functions:

pglobal -f progname

Easy!  Obviously these tools only work if the DWARF information is not stripped out.

All in all, these are really useful tools to know about and will help me in producing better code in the future.