### 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.