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We once called that “image activation” before the Industry was taken over by human LLMs in the wake of the dot-com crash.
Pretty sure only VMS used that term.
FreeBSD still uses this term. Eg, the elf code lives in sys/kern/imgact_elf.c
Oh, nice. Did not know that executable image processing had moved to user space. Does this eliminate kernel crashes from malformed executables?
I remember learning about ELF files first because that’s how you’d run pirated PS2 games. Funny how my insatiable appetite for games in my teens resulted in learning so much about Linux executable files and eventually it seemed inevitable that I should just learn to code.
Funny how a lot of us got into computers that way. For me, it was wanting to play Prince of Persia and other DOS games on my cousin's PC when he wasn't around. Figured out what CD and DIR did and how I could run different games by varying the commands. In a few years I was whipping up my own game launcher using AUTOEXEC.BAT, which got me into scripting. I learned to love DOS, and so the eventual transition to Linux was easy for me as I already a CLI fan and I was blown away with how much more powerful the Linux terminal was. It was basically love at first sight.