Question

I would like to know what is the way (if it is possible at all), to change the version information of a *.a files in Unix after the compilation.
I know how to do it for Dll files in windows – but have no idea how to manage with it in Unix.

Thank you all!

Answer 1

Static libraries are just archives of .o files – they don’t embed version themselves unless your code somehow publishes a symbol that holds version information.

Like:

int libFoo_version = 0x01000000;

Or you could use

char* libFoo_version = "1.0";

and afterwards use something like the strings libFoo.a | grep libFoo_version command in combination with sed to alter the version information.

Yet another option is to embed an empty file in the archive which name contains the version information. YMMV