pdp11-xstr

Bill Joy's 1978 xstr: extracts and hashes the string literals of a C program into a shared strings file, replacing them with indexes — the classic text-space saver for big BSD programs.

pdp11-xstr [ -v ] [ -c ] [ - ] [ name ... ]

• Needed for byte-fidelity: 2.9's /usr/70/rogue was built through xstr, so reproducing it exactly requires reproducing the string pool exactly — which this port does (see the rogue byte-identity result in NOTES.md).
• -c extracts without the shared-pool merge step, - reads standard input, -v narrates; output goes to x.c and the accumulated strings file, as the original did.

Build and test

make          # builds ../../bin/pdp11-xstr
make check    # exercised via the rogue overlay reproduction

Documentation

• Design — the string-extraction pass and how xs.c and strings are emitted.
• User guide — using it inside a build.