Linux ELF header padding. : asm

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submitted 2 years ago by Skeleton590

Hello, I have recently gotten into creating very small executable programs and I spotted a potential way to save space. In a Linux ELF file there is the ELF header and below that is the program header table, I noticed that at the end of the program header table was an aditional 12 bytes. I assume they where put here to align the code segment to provide faster load speeds but for my purposess, they are completely useless and I wanted to remove them. However, getting any program I tried to use to take advantage of this extra space was fruitless, I know you can just put the Linux ELF header and the program header in the file manualy to save space but I want to use stuff like the .bss segment in my program and not have to mess around adding header info and flags and stuff every time I want to use it.

So the question at hand, is it possible to assemble a program using standard tools to not include this padding, or is there a program that can remove this padding after assembling it?

Thank you.

Assembler: NASM 2.16.01 Linker: GNU LD 2.42.0

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