lfs-book/chapter06/strippingagain.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE sect1 PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.3//EN" "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.3/docbookx.dtd">
<sect1 id="ch-system-strippingagain">
<title>Stripping again</title>
<?dbhtml filename="strippingagain.html"?>

<para>If you are not a programmer and don't plan to do any debugging on your
system software, you can shrink your system by about 200 MB by removing the
debugging symbols from binaries and libraries. This causes no inconvenience
other than not being able to debug the software fully any more.</para>

<para>Most people who use the command mentioned below don't experience any
problems. But it is easy to make a typo and render your new system unusable, so
before running the strip command it is probably a good idea to make a backup of
the current situation.</para>

<para>If you are going to perform the stripping, special care is needed to
ensure you're not running any of the binaries that are about to be stripped.
If you're not sure whether you entered chroot with the command given in
<xref linkend="ch-system-chroot"/>, then first exit from chroot:</para>

<screen><userinput>logout</userinput></screen>

<para>Then reenter it with:</para>

<screen><userinput>chroot $LFS /tools/bin/env -i \
    HOME=/root TERM=$TERM PS1='\u:\w\$ ' \
    PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin \
    /tools/bin/bash --login</userinput></screen>

<para>Now you can safely strip the binaries and libraries:</para>

<screen><userinput>/tools/bin/find /{,usr/}{bin,lib,sbin} -type f \
   -exec /tools/bin/strip --strip-debug '{}' ';'</userinput></screen>

<para>A large number of files will be reported as having their file format not
recognized. These warnings can be safely ignored, they just mean that those
files are scripts instead of binaries, no harm is done.</para>

<para>If you are really tight on disk space, you may want to use
<parameter>--strip-all</parameter> on the binaries in
<filename class="directory">/{,usr/}{bin,sbin}</filename> to gain several more megabytes. But do
<emphasis>not</emphasis> use this option on libraries: they would be
destroyed.</para>

</sect1>