question about linker

[DJ Delorie]

> Is 'ld' a part of gcc toolchain?

See http://sources.redhat.com/binutils/

>    6617       char *s = find_a_file (&exec_prefixes, "collect2", X_OK, 0);

collect2 is a wrapper around ld which invokes ld twice if needed -
once to gather information, and a second time with an additional
object it generates that supports some of the features gcc provides
which need to know about all the symbols in the file.