I have several versions of a project checkout out and compiled. If I spot an error, I compare the versions to narrow the problem down. Sometimes I enable sanitizers like the AddressSanitizer. If I re-use an executable, I don't remember whether it was compiled with the sanitizers or not. If the executable works fine, I am not sure whether the bug is not there or whether I did not include the sanitizer in this build. So I have to reconfigure and rebuild to make sure I have the sanitizer included.
Is there a way to check whether an executable has been compiled with a sanitizer?
Address sanitizer can also be compiled statically with the -static-libasan option in GCC. Statically compiling address sanitizer is the default mode in Clang.
If you compile address sanitizer statically then it is obviously not possible to use ldd to verify if your binary is sanitized or not. In this case I use nm and check if there are sanitizer symbols in the binary:
nm -an <executable> | grep asan