What causes linker only giving "ld returned 1 exit status" message?

Question

I am using "--verbose" for ld in an attempt to get something useful for finding the problem, but it prints the error message amidst printing normal "--verbose" output:

[...blah - dump of linker script...]
attempt to open blah1.o succeeded
blah1.o
attempt to open blah2.o succeeded
blah2.o
[...blah - more opens that succeeded...]
attempt to open blah9.o succeeded
blah9.o
attemcollect2: ld returned 1 exit status

Invoked by:

gcc blah1.o [...blah...] blah9.o blahLib1.a blahLib2.a -g -lc -nostdlib -Wl,--warn-constructors -fpic -fno-pic -Wl,-q -Wl,-gc-sections -Wl,--verbose -T blahScript.ld -lm -o blahProgram.elf

Answer 1

It's a generic error. Usually caused by undefined reference to a symbol.

I don't think you need --verbose to see the error. ld should print the cause of the error in any case. Try to run it without --verbose and carefully examine every line of the output.