Hi Matt,
On Dec 17, 2008, at 6:15 PM, Matt McDonald wrote:
Why does PAR create .out binaries on Linux? From what I read on
Wikipedia this format is old and no longer used.
As far as I know, the file is named `a.out' entirely for historical
reasons: it isn't in the a.out format. On most (all?) Linux systems,
you can check this by running:
$ file a.out
It should say something like "ELF executable", indicating it is in the
ELF format, not the a.out format. Unix systems usually ignore the file
extension entirely, using the file header to identify executables.
Hope that helps.
cheers,
Gaurav
