If you are not a programmer and don't plan to do any debugging on your system software, you can shrink your system by about 200 MB by removing the debugging symbols from binaries and libraries. This causes no inconvenience other than not being able to debug the software fully any more.

Most people who use the command mentioned below don't experience any problems. But it is easy to make a typo and render your new system unusable, so before running the strip command it is probably a good idea to make a backup of the current situation.

If you are going to perform the stripping, special care is needed to ensure you're not running any of the binaries that are about to be stripped. If you're not sure whether you entered chroot with the command given in the section called “Entering the chroot environment”, then first exit from chroot:

logout

Then reenter it with:

chroot $LFS /tools/bin/env -i \
    HOME=/root TERM=$TERM PS1='\u:\w\$ ' \
    PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin \
    /tools/bin/bash --login

Now you can safely strip the binaries and libraries:

/tools/bin/find /{,usr/}{bin,lib,sbin} -type f \
   -exec /tools/bin/strip --strip-debug '{}' ';'

A large number of files will be reported as having their file format not recognized. These warnings can be safely ignored, they just mean that those files are scripts instead of binaries, no harm is done.

If you are really tight on disk space, you may want to use --strip-all on the binaries in /{,usr/}{bin,sbin} to gain several more megabytes. But do not use this option on libraries: they would be destroyed.