Thanks Ian, Alan, and Jonathan. The --whole-archive option worked for me. My extra argument (put in at the very beginning of the link command, which was gcc-4.6 on ubuntu 12.04, for reference) was: -Wl,--whole-archive,library1,library2,...,--no-whole-archive (because the first library added some more unresolved symbols, so i needed a second library, etc ---- luckily 4 were enough). I was not able to use the -l abbreviation, so i had to put in the full path for each library /usr/lib/....../library.a. (That's not a complaint, just an observation, btw.) Of course this does make for a bigger executable but that's ok for what i'm doing. I appreciate everybody's help! dan
