_init in shared libraries?

[Bruce Korb]

Hi Guys,

I tried an experiment that failed.  dlopen is documented
as invoking _init when linking is complete and dlclose
as calling _fini.  So, I went and tried to use this feature.
Unfortunately, when I invoked gcc as the linker, it decided
to forcibly include a couple of no-op routines by the same
name and choked.  Reading man pages and GCC sources got me
nowhere vis-a-vis skipping the no-op routines.  As the
linker invocation specialists, I'm appealing to you  :-).
Is there supposed to be a way to tell GCC/collect2/ld to
let me supply my own _init and _fini routines?  Or, am I
required to have a pre-determined external name that I
must reference?  If so, what is the point of _init?
*sigh*.

P.S.  I did a ``gcc -v'', grabbed the collect2 invocation
and deleted the file containing the unwanted externals.
Using that invocation resulted in a perfectly working
shared library with my own _init routine.  Too clumsy for
real use, tho.