etext(3)

etext3

End boundaries of image segments

Part of edata(3).

Usage

extern end; extern etext; extern edata;

Overview

The globals end, etext and edata are program segment end addresses.

etext is the first address after the end of the text segment.

edata is the first address after the end of the initialized data segment.

end is the first address after the end of the data segment (BSS) when the program is loaded. Use the sbrk(2) system call with zero as its argument to find the current end of the data segment.

Releases

87 releases since FreeBSD 2.0.5-RELEASE; the text changed 41 times.

  1. 2.0.5–2.1.7.1
  2. 2.2.2–2.2.8
  3. 2.2.9
  4. 3.0–3.2
  5. 3.3–3.5.1
  6. 4.0–4.1
  7. 4.1.1–4.2
  8. 4.3–4.11
  9. 5.0–6.3
  10. 6.4
  11. 7.0
  12. 7.1
  13. 7.2
  14. 7.3
  15. 7.4
  16. 8.0
  17. 8.1
  18. 8.2
  19. 8.3
  20. 8.4
  21. 9.0
  22. 9.1
  23. 9.2
  24. 9.3
  25. 10.0
  26. 10.1
  27. 10.2
  28. 10.3
  29. 10.4
  30. 11.0
  31. 11.1
  32. 11.2
  33. 11.3
  34. 11.4
  35. 12.0
  36. 12.1
  37. 12.2
  38. 12.3
  39. 12.4
  40. 13.0–13.2
  41. 13.3–14.5
  42. 15.0–16.0

History

An end manual page appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX.

Bugs

Traditionally, no variable existed that pointed to the start of the text segment because the text segment always started at address zero. Although it is no longer valid to make this assumption, no variable similar to the ones documented above exists to point to the start of the text segment.

From base 16.0-CURRENT-20261027-61c70dc16a79 in FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT (2026-10-27). Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.