Does GCC link only used functions?

[Shriramana Sharma <samjnaa@gmail.com>]

Hello list. I am relative newbie to GCC.

I have a C program which #includes a header file which in turn #includes many 
other header files. These header files are part of an open source library set 
I got from the net.

Now I do not use all the functions in the various libraries, but the makefile 
which came with the library of course has compile instructions for all the 
libraries. I have modified the makefile to compile my program using those 
libraries, but I did not remove the references to the libraries I knew I did 
not use, for I feared that some error may be caused.

But later I experimented removing some of the superfluous ones from the 
makefile and again "make"-d, and I got the same size executable as before.

So does this mean that GCC links only those functions from a library which I 
call directly or indirectly through another called function in the course of 
my program?

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