7.59 .local names

This directive, which is available for ELF targets, marks each symbol in the comma-separated list of names as a local symbol so that it will not be externally visible. If the symbols do not already exist, they will be created.

For targets where the .lcomm directive (see Lcomm) does not accept an alignment argument, which is the case for most ELF targets, the .local directive can be used in combination with .comm (see Comm) to define aligned local common data.