Getting Statically Linked Binaries under Debian
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Getting Statically Linked Binaries under Debian

Jurjen Bokma

March 2009

Say you need e.g. a statically linked mkdosfs under Debian (see ).

  1. $ dpkg -S $(which mkdosfs)
    dosfstools: /sbin/mkdosfs

  2. $ sudo apt-get build-dep dosfstools
    Reading package lists... Done
    Building dependency tree
    Reading state information... Done
    0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.

  3. (Make sure you have some deb-src lines in /etc/apt/sources.list)

    $ mkdir src
    $ apt-get source --build dosfstools     1
    <snip>

    1

    You may have to use sudo here. For some programs, some probes by the configure script fail without root permissions, and all you see is that they fail.

  4. $ find dosfstools-2.11/ -iname mkdosfs -exec file {} \;
    dosfstools-2.11/mkdosfs/mkdosfs: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.6.8, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped
    $ cd dosfstools-2.11/mkdosfs/

  5. $ export CFLAGS=-static
    $ export LDFLAGS=-static
    $ export CPPFLAGS=-static
    $ make mkdosfs
    cc -static mkdosfs.o -o mkdosfs
    $ file mkdosfs
    mkdosfs: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.6.8, statically linked, not stripped

As an alternative, you may be lucky seeing that setting the compiler/linker flags before running the apt-get source delivers statically linked binaries immediately:

  1. $ export CFLAGS=-static
    $ export LDFLAGS=-static
    $ export CPPFLAGS=-static
    $ export CFLAGS_APPEND=-static
    $ export LDFLAGS_APPEND=-static
    $ export CPPFLAGS_APPEND=-static


  2. $ apt-get source --build dosfstools
    <snip>
    $ find -iname mkdosfs -type f -exec file {} \;