mach-o/ranlib.h

There are two known orders of table of contents for archives. The first is the order ranlib(1) originally produced and still produces without any options. This table of contents has the archive member name "__.SYMDEF" This order has the ranlib structures in the order the objects appear in the archive and the symbol names of those objects in the order of symbol table. The second know order is sorted by symbol name and is produced with the -s option to ranlib(1). This table of contents has the archive member name "__.SYMDEF SORTED" and many programs (notably the 1.0 version of ld(1) can't tell the difference between names because of the imbedded blank in the name and works with either table of contents). This second order is used by the post 1.0 link editor to produce faster linking. The original 1.0 version of ranlib(1) gets confused when it is run on a archive with the second type of table of contents because it and ar(1) which it uses use different ways to determined the member name (ar(1) treats all blanks in the name as significant and ranlib(1) only checks for the first one).

#define SYMDEF "__.SYMDEF"

Structure of the __.SYMDEF table of contents for an archive. __.SYMDEF begins with a uint32_t giving the size in bytes of the ranlib structures which immediately follow, and then continues with a string table consisting of a uint32_t giving the number of bytes of strings which follow and then the strings themselves. The ran_strx fields index the string table whose first byte is numbered 0.