%general-entities; ]> This section is optional. If the intended user is not a programmer and does not plan to do any debugging on the system software, the system size can be decreased by about 2 GB by removing the debugging symbols from binaries and libraries. This causes no inconvenience other than not being able to debug the software fully anymore. Most people who use the commands mentioned below do not experience any difficulties. However, it is easy to make a typo and render the new system unusable, so before running the strip commands, it is a good idea to make a backup of the LFS system in its current state. First place the debugging symbols for selected libraries in separate files. This debugging information is needed if running regression tests that use valgrind or gdb later in BLFS. save_usrlib="ld-&glibc-version;.so libc-&glibc-version;.so libpthread-&glibc-version;.so libthread_db-&libthread_db-version;.so libquadmath.so.&libquadmath-version; libstdc++.so.&libstdcpp-version; libz.so.&zlib-version; libitm.so.&libitm-version; libatomic.so.&libatomic-version;" cd /usr/lib for LIB in $save_usrlib; do objcopy --only-keep-debug $LIB $LIB.dbg cp $LIB /tmp/$LIB strip --strip-unneeded /tmp/$LIB objcopy --add-gnu-debuglink=$LIB.dbg /tmp/$LIB install -vm755 /tmp/$LIB /usr/lib rm /tmp/$LIB done unset LIB save_usrlib Now the binaries and libraries can be stripped: find /usr/lib -type f -name \*.a \ -exec strip --strip-debug {} ';' find /usr/lib -type f -name \*.so* ! -name \*dbg ! -name libz.so* \ -exec strip --strip-unneeded {} ';' find /usr/{bin,sbin,libexec} -type f \ -exec strip --strip-all {} ';' A large number of files will be reported as having their file format not recognized. These warnings can be safely ignored. These warnings indicate that those files are scripts instead of binaries.