[taway1237]

I disagree. For me it's useful mostly for position independent shellcode prologue, which has no sections to speak of, and may get embedded in a "normal" executable or something that is not an executable at all (useful in a bootloader, or for injecting code to another process, or self-relocating code, etc). I use this "trick" all the time and I never felt the need to mess with a linker for this.

But it's a good hint, I hope I didn't sound overly negative.

[_nalply]

Your point is interesting. I didn't think about this use case. Inject code with ptrace. Like the LD_PRELOAD trick but you don't even need LD_PRELOAD, just attach and bamboozle the running process into running some code you provided. In such cases sections don't exist, but pages. Right.