The pvs utility displays any internal version information contained within an ELF file. Commonly, these files are dynamic executables and shared objects, and possibly relocatable objects. This version information can fall into one of two categories:

• version definitions
• version dependencies

Version definitions describe the interfaces made available by an ELF file. Each version definition is associated to a set of global symbols provided by the file. Version definitions may be assigned to a file during its creation by the link-editor using the -M option and the associated mapfile directives (see the Linker and Libraries Guide for more details).

Version dependencies describe the binding requirements of dynamic objects on the version definitions of any shared object dependencies. When a dynamic object is built with a shared object, the link-editor records information within the dynamic object indicating that the shared object is a dependency. This dependency must be satisfied at runtime. If the shared object also contains version definitions, then those version definitions that satisfy the global symbol requirements of the dynamic object will also be recorded in the dynamic object being created. At process initialization, the runtime linker will use any version dependencies as a means of validating the interface requirements of the dynamic objects used to construct the process.

The following options are supported. If neither the -d or -r options are specified, both will be enabled.

-C

Demangles C++ symbol names.

-d

Prints version definition information.

-l

When used with the -s option, prints any symbols that have been reduced from global to local binding due to versioning. By convention, these symbol entries are located in the .symtab section, and fall between the FILE symbol representing the output file, and the FILE symbol representing the first input file used to generate the output file. These reduced symbol entries are assigned the fabricated version definition _REDUCED_. No reduced symbols will be printed if the file has been stripped (see strip(1)), or if the symbol entry convention cannot be determined.

-n

Normalizes version definition information. By default, all version definitions within the object are displayed. However, version definitions may inherit other version definitions, and under normalization only the head of each inheritance list is displayed.

-N name

Prints only the information for the given version definition name and any of its inherited version definitions (when used with the -d option), or for the given dependency file name (when used with the -r option).

-o

Creates one-line version definition output. By default, file, version definitions, and any symbol output is indented to ease human inspection. This option prefixes each output line with the file and version definition name and may be more useful for analysis with automated tools.

-r

Prints version dependency (requirements) information.

-s

Prints the symbols associated with each version definition. Any data symbols are accompanied with the size, in bytes, of the data item.

-v

Verbose output. Indicates any weak version definitions, and any version definition inheritance. When used with the -N and -d options, the inheritance of the base version definition is also shown. When used with the -s option, the version symbol definition is also shown.

The following operands are supported.

file

The ELF file about which internal version information is displayed.

If the requested version information is not found, a non-zero value is returned; otherwise a 0 value is returned.

Version information is determined not found when any of the following is true:

• the -d option is specified and no version definitions are found;
• the -r option is specified and no version requirements are found;
• neither the -d nor -r option is specified and no version definitions or version requirements are found.

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

ld(1), ldd(1), strip(1), elf(3ELF), attributes(5)

Linker and Libraries Guide