if you strip an already stripped binary, nothing happens. as far as i understand it, stripping strips the debug information, and other stuff out of binaries. if there's nothing to strip, it can't strip anymore so ignores the file. my suggestion for stripping libraries is: strip --strip-debug filename that's the safest solution - read that in the lfs book. stripping libraries might be dangerous, because libraries are needed to run almost every command on your system, from init to ls.
