where does bss come from?

[Joe Pruett]

Here's my two cents worth...

I remember BSS standing for "Block Save Storage".  When you have
an unitialized global variable, it is "added" to the BSS area.
This area is actually only a number in the a.out header which
is the amount of memory to be allocated and zeroed out when the
program starts.  No disk space is allocated in the executable file
for this area, since it is all zeroes, therefore the term
"Block Save Storage".

	-joey