rting
two syntaxes for EXCLUDE_FILE is useful if the section list contains
more than one section, as described below.

   There are two ways to include more than one section:
     *(.text .rdata)
     *(.text) *(.rdata)
The difference between these is the order in which the '.text' and
'.rdata' input sections will appear in the output section.  In the first
example, they will be intermingled, appearing in the same order as they
are found in the linker input.  In the second example, all '.text' input
sections will appear first, followed by all '.rdata' input sections.

   When using EXCLUDE_FILE with more than one section, if the exclusion
is within the section list then the exclusion only applies to the
immediately following section, for example:
     *(EXCLUDE_FILE (*somefile.o) .text .rdata)
will cause all '.text' sections from all files except 'somefile.o' to be
included, while all '.rdata' sections from all files, including
'somefile.o', will be included.  To exclude the '.rdata' sections from
'somefile.o' the example could be modified to:
     *(EXCLUDE_FILE (*somefile.o) .text EXCLUDE_FILE (*somefile.o) .rdata)
Alternatively, placing the EXCLUDE_FILE outside of the section list,
before the input file selection, will cause the exclusion to apply for
all sections.  Thus the previous example can be rewritten as:
     EXCLUDE_FILE (*somefile.o) *(.text .rdata)

   You can specify a file name to include sections from a particular
file.  You would do this if one or more of your files contain special
data that needs to be at a particular location in memory.  For example:
     data.o(.data)

   To refine the sections that are included based on the section flags
of an input section, INPUT_SECTION_FLAGS may be used.

   Here is a simple example for using Section header flags for ELF
sections:

     SECTIONS {
       .text : { INPUT_SECTION_FLAGS (SHF_MERGE & SHF_STRINGS) *(.text) }
       .text2 :  { INPUT_SECTION_FLAGS (!SHF_WRITE) *(.text) }
     }

   In this example, the output section '.text' will be comprised of any
input section matching the name *(.text) whose section header flags
'SHF_MERGE' and 'SHF_STRINGS' are set.  The output section '.text2' will
be comprised of any input section matching the name *(.text) whose
section header flag 'SHF_WRITE' is clear.

   You can also specify files within archives by writing a pattern
matching the archive, a colon, then the pattern matching the file, with
no whitespace around the colon.

'archive:file'
     matches file within archive
'archive:'
     matches the whole archive
':file'
     matches file but not one in an archive

   Either one or both of 'archive' and 'file' can contain shell
wildcards.  On DOS based file systems, the linker will assume that a
single letter followed by a colon is a drive specifier, so 'c:myfile.o'
is a simple file specification, not 'myfile.o' within an archive called
'c'.  'archive:file' filespecs may also be used within an 'EXCLUDE_FILE'
list, but may not appear in other linker script contexts.  For instance,
you cannot extract a file from an archive by using 'archive:file' in an
'INPUT' command.

   If you use a file name without a list of sections, then all sections
in the input file will be included in the output section.  This is not
commonly done, but it may by useful on occasion.  For example:
     data.o

   When you use a file name which is not an 'archive:file' specifier and
does not contain any wild card characters, the linker will first see if
you also specified the file name on the linker command line or in an
'INPUT' command.  If you did not, the linker will attempt to open the
file as an input file, as though it appeared on the command line.  Note
that this differs from an 'INPUT' command, because the linker will not
search for the file in the archive search path.