<
programming, tool> (
link editor, linkage editor,
link loader)
A program that combines one or more files containing {object
code} from separately compiled program
modules into a single
file containing loadable or executable code
This process involves resolving references between the
modules and fixing the
relocation information used by the
operating system
kernel when loading the file into memory to
run it.
Under
Unix, the
linker is called "ld" and
object files
have filename extension .o (object), .so (shared object), or
.lib (
library), and the resulting
executable is called
"a.out" by default.
(2001-10-13)