Object files know where they're built?!?

[Nathanael Nerode <neroden at twcny dot rr dot com>]

Joseph Myers said:
>dependencies, between all stages, to one invocation of make, but this
>can't work because each stage needs to be built separately, with the 
>files
>in the same location (not in the stage subdirectory), for the compare
>stage to succeed.

I ran into this when I tried to use a different scheme for building 
stage1.  I wanted to compare the files produced by my new scheme with 
the files produced by the original.  My new scheme built stage1 in a 
different directory (stage1-gcc).  Every object file differed at byte 33 
or 34.

I couldn't figure out why.

Do the object files (on i686-pc-linux-gnu) somehow encode their build 
location?  This would be stupid, obviously, but if it's true it's true. 
:-)  Is there a way to compare the object files without regard to 
spurious differences like this?

--Nathanael