pdp11-objcopy

Copy or extract a PDP-11 a.out.

pdp11-objcopy [-O binary] [-j text|data] infile outfile

invocation	result
(no options)	copy infile → outfile unchanged (identity a.out copy)
-O binary	the loadable image: text + initialized data, no header or symbols
-j text	the text segment only, raw
-j data	the initialized-data segment only, raw

PDP-11 is an a.out-only world — there is no ELF target the modern binutils understand — so, unlike the VAX tree's objcopy, the useful operations here are loadable-image and segment extraction. Removing the symbol table and relocation is pdp11-strip's job; disassembly is pdp11-das's.

Extraction supports the ordinary magics 0407/0410/0411, whose text and data are contiguous on disk after the 16-byte header. First Edition (0405) and auto-overlay (0430/0431) images have a different on-disk layout, so extraction from them is refused rather than producing the wrong bytes. The header's segment sizes are validated against the actual file length before any slice is written.

Documentation

• Design — the object read/rewrite pipeline and the format conversions.
• User guide — the options and conversion examples.