"global main" in Assembly

I came across this snippet of code:

section .text
global main ;must be declared for linker (gcc)

and then there is a function called main after this line:

main: ;tell linker entry point

but i don't seem to understand what `global main` means, and the comment doesn't seem to help much...

i am using [this site][1] as a reference to Assembly language programming.

i can analyse that `main` refers to the function main, but i don't understand the use of the `global` keyword...

thank you in advance...


[1]:

[To see links please register here]

`global main` basically means that the symbol should be visible to the linker because other object files will use it. Without it, the symbol `main` is considered local to the object file it's assembled to, and will not appear after the assembly file is assembled.