HP Fortran Programmer's Guide (B3908-90031; September 2011)

Debugging
Stripping debugging information
Chapter 4122
Stripping debugging information
Programs compiled with HP Fortran include minimal debugging information in the executable program.
This information consists of a symbol table—a list of all the symbols in your program and their offset
addresses. The symbol table provides the information needed to produce a procedure traceback. It is also
used by the debugger and by the CXperf performance analysis tool.
However, the symbol table is not the same as the debugging information that is added to your program when
you compile with the -g option. The symbol table is added to an executable even if the program is not
compiled with the -g option.
If the size of executable is critical to your application, you can use the +strip option to remove symbol
table information from the production version of your program. If you compile and link on separate
command lines, you must use the +strip option on both command lines. Instead of recompiling with
+strip, you can use the strip utility, which removes all debugging information, including the symbol
table.
If the size of your executable is not important, you may want to retain the symbol table in the production
version of your program. This table can be used by the debugger to provide minimal debugging. If a
program has not been compiled with -g and does not include a symbol table, it is unusable by the debugger.
Also, without the information provided by the symbol table, a procedure traceback displays virtual addresses
only.
The amount of code that the symbol table information that adds to an executable is considerably less than the
amount that compiling with -g adds. For descriptions of the -g and +strip options, refer to the
HP Fortran Programmer’s Reference. For information about the strip utility, refer to the strip(1) man
page.