otool - object file displaying tool

otool is equivalent to the tool Depends.exe on Windows, and lld on Linux.

lipo - create or operate on universal files

The operations that lipo performs are:

• -info: listing the architecture types in a universal file;
• -create: creating a single universal file from one or more input files;
• -thin: thinning out a single universal file to one specified architecture type;
• -replace/remove/extract: extracting, replacing, and/or removing architectures types from the input file to create a single new universal output file.

strings - find the printable strings in a object, or other binary, file

Strings looks for ASCII strings in a binary file or standard input.
Strings is useful for identifying random object files and many other things.
A string is any sequence of 4 (the default) or more printing characters ending with a newline or a null.
Unless the - flag is given, strings looks in allsections of the object files except the (__TEXT,__text) section.

nm - display name list (symbol table)

nm displays the name list (symbol table) of each object file in the argument list. If an argument is an archive, a listing for each object file in the archive will be produced.

Each symbol name is preceded by its value (blanks if undefined).

Unless the -m option is specified, this value is followed by one of the following characters, representing the symbol type:

• U undefined,
• A absolute,
• T text section symbol,
• D data section symbol,
• B bss section symbol,
• C common symbol,
• S symbol in a section other than those above,
• I indirect symbol.

If the symbol is local, the symbol’s type is instead represented by the corresponding lowercase letter.

If the symbol is a Objective C method, the symbol name is +-[Class_name(category_name) method:name:], where + is for class methods, - is for instance methods, and (category_name) is present only when the method is in a category.