1. Binutils is a collection of binary utilities, including ar (for creating, modifying and extracting from archives), as (a family of GNU assemblers), gprof (for displaying call graph profile data), ld (theGNU linker), nm (for listing symbols from object files), objcopy (for copying and translating object files), objdump (for displaying information from object files), ranlib (for generating an index for the contents of an archive), size (for listing the section sizes of an object or archive file), strings (for listing printable strings from files), strip (for discarding symbols), and addr2line (for converting addresses to file and line). From Redhat 8.0 RPM

2. The GNU assembler, linker and binary utilities. The programs in this package are used to assemble, link and manipulate binary and object files. They may be used in conjunction with a compiler and various libraries to build programs for Linux. From Debian 3.0r0 APT