How can I examine contents of a data section of an ELF file on Linux?

Question

I've been using objdump to look at assembly code in Linux ELF binaries.

Sometimes there is an indirect jump through a jump table that is stored in the rodata (read-only data) section.

How to get objdump or any other tool to show me the contents of this data section?

I could execute the program and examine the relevant addresses in the debugger, but I don't want to do that because it has to be done interactively.

The ideal answer will identify a tool that will not only show me the contents but will let me control the display format, much as od does.

Answer 1

objdump -s -j .rodata exefile 

gives a side-by-side hex/printable ASCII dump of the contents of the rodata section like:

Contents of section .rodata:  0000 67452301 efcdab89 67452301 efcdab89  gE#.....gE#.....  0010 64636261 68676665 64636261 68676665  dcbahgfedcbahgfe 

It doesn't look like there's anything in there to control formatting, but it's a start. You could always undump the hex and feed it to od, I suppose :)

Answer 2

readelf -x .rodata hello_world.o 

gives:

Hex dump of section '.rodata':   0x00000000 48656c6c 6f20776f 726c6421 0a       Hello world!. 

You should prefer readelf when possible since objdump simply does not show some sections like .symtab: Why does objdump not show .bss, .shstratab, .symtab and .strtab sections?

You can also extract the raw bytes with the techniques mentioned at: How do you extract only the contents of an ELF section and as mentioned by ysdx.