title: Does appending arbitrary data to an ELF file violate the ELF spec?
body: <p>I would like to add some information to an ELF file, but it ideally needs to be done in a way that a program can easily read this information without understanding ELF or using tools outside a normal standard language library.  I was thinking of simply appending this data to the end of the ELF file (with some sort of sentinel to indicate the start of the data so the reading program can just seek backward to the sentinel), but I wanted to make sure this doesn't violate the ELF spec first.  I'm not interested in whether a particular loader works fine with such appended data; I want to know if the ELF spec itself guarantees anything so that I can know different ELF-compliant loaders will be happy with it.</p>
  
  <p>I see that questions like this have been asked before, but either assuming that this appending is ok or with no direct responses:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5660792/accessing-data-appended-to-an-elf-binary">Accessing data appended to an ELF binary</a></li>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1818846/add-source-code-to-elf-file">Add source code to elf file</a></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>As far as I can tell, the ELF spec is here:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><a href="http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/ELF.txt" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/ELF.txt</a></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I couldn't determine with a few searches whether the property I want is unambiguously allowed by that spec.</p>