How does linker know which symbols should be resolved at runtime? Particularly I’m interested what information shared object files carry that instruct linker to resolve symbols at runtime. How does the dynamic symbol resolution work at runtime, i.e. what executable will do to find the symbol and in case multiple symbols with the same name were defined which would be found?
What happens if the file was linked only statically, but then it’s linked dynamically at run-time as part of a shared library? Which symbol will be used by the executable? In other words, is that possible to override symbols in an executable by linking those symbols into a shared library?
The platform in question is SUN OS.
Check out this article from Linux Journal. For more information — perhaps specifically related to Windows, AIX, OSx, etc — I would recommend the Wikipedia article on Linker (computing) and the references therein.