read-only data
The part of a program that holds constants such as string literals; the program may read it but not change it.
The read-only data section (.rodata on ELF, .rdata on COFF, __TEXT,__const and __TEXT,__cstring on Mach-O) holds constants and string literals and is mapped without write permission.
Examples
A string literal such as
"count"lives in read-only data, so writing to it crashes the program.
See also