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2.12 Targets

Description
Each port of BFD to a different machine requires the creation of a target back end. All the back end provides to the root part of BFD is a structure containing pointers to functions which perform certain low level operations on files. BFD translates the applications's requests through a pointer into calls to the back end routines.

When a file is opened with bfd_openr, its format and target are unknown. BFD uses various mechanisms to determine how to interpret the file. The operations performed are:

Once the BFD has been opened and the target selected, the file format may be determined. This is done by calling bfd_check_format on the BFD with a suggested format. If target_defaulted has been set, each possible target type is tried to see if it recognizes the specified format. bfd_check_format returns TRUE when the caller guesses right.