COFF

Overview

COFF (Common Object File Format) was originally developed for UNIX System V by AT&T. It was intended as a replacement for a.out, adding features like shared libraries and relocation records, but it was shortly after replaced by the ELF format.

Nowadays, remnants of COFF can be found almost exclusively in the PE-EXE format which is based on COFF

References

• Texas Instruments has a nice overview of the COFF format
• Since DJGPP uses a variant of COFF , they also have a summary available here