Date: Mon, 1 Jun 1998 20:07:07 +0300 (IDT)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: Michal Rudolf <mrudolf AT rainbow DOT mimuw DOT edu DOT pl>
cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: What is in executableS?
In-Reply-To: <356ff9d8.2366223@news.tpsa.pl>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.980601200642.16341Q-100000@is>
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On Sat, 30 May 1998, Michal Rudolf wrote:

> I wonder what such texts as:
> 
> EXE|COM|BAT|BTM|DLL|VXD||A|A01|A02|A03|A04|A05|ADL|ARC|ARJ|ASC|ASM|AUX|AWK|BAS|BIB
> BGI|BMP|C|CC|CFG|CGZ|CH3|CHR|CI|CLP|CMF|CPI|CPP|CXX|DAT|DBF|DIZ|DOC|DVI|E|EL|ELC|F77
> [cut]
> 
> are doing in DJGPP-generated executables?

This gets linked into any program which calls `stat' or `fstat'.  They
both report the execute bit, and that generally requires to read the
first two bytes of the file, to look for the magical "MZ" or "#!"
signatures.  The above list of known extensions allows to bypass the
expensive reads in many popular cases, and speeds up programs which
call these two functions.

> It seems that there are kilobytes of uninitialized data in every
> *.exe created by DJGPP.

This is *initialized* data, so I don't follow your last assertion.