Re: Readelf section header printing alignment

[Nick Clifton <nickc@redhat.com>]

Hi Pete,

> The section headers output from readelf with the '-W' option become ugly and
> unaligned when a section name is too long.

Agreed.  In hindsight it would have been better to emit the section name
as the last entry on the output line, rather than the second.

If it helps you could try using the readelf program the elfutils project
(eu-readelf) as this appear to adjust the column positions to allow for
extra long section names.  I think that this is a bad idea however as
it could end up looking very strange if just one section has an extremely
long section name.

Changing the default output layout now would be a bad idea as there
are scripts and tools out there that depend upon the current behaviour.

It would be possible however to add a new command line option which
would change the layout.  Perhaps simply --section-name-at-end ?
Although this seems a bit, hmm, hackish.  Or maybe:

   --section-listing-layout=[number,name,type,addr,off,size,flags,info,align]

Then this option could be used to just display the fields of interest
to the user, in the order that they want.  So:

   --section-listing-layout=type,size,name

would produce output like this:

   Section Headers:
     Type      Size     Name
     NULL           0
     PROGBITS  00000f  .text
     PROGBITS  000000  .data
     NOBITS    000000  .bss
     PROGBITS  00002c  .comment
     PROGBITS  000000  .note.GNU-stack
     NOTE      000020  .note.gnu.property

whereas:

  --section-listing-layout=name,size

would produce output like this:

   Section Headers:
     Name Size
       0
     .text 00000f
     .data 000000
     .bss  000000
     .comment 00002c
     .note.GNU-stack 000000
     .note.gnu.property 000020

I am just theorizing however.  I am not actually volunteering to write
the code.  But, as they say, "patches welcome"...

Cheers
   Nick