The command line ax help prints the following:
Deletes named files from an archive file.
Replaces (or adds) named files in an archive file. Any archive copies of the named files are deleted and new contents of the files are added to the archive. It is not necessary for the file to have previously been in the archive. If the archive file did not previously exist, it will be created and a warning message printed (unless option c is also specified).
List files in the archive. Without v, this just lists the names of the files. With v, the list includes file sizes and dates.
Extracts named files from an archive file. The archive will be searched for the specified filenames and the named files will be created and written with the contents of the archived files. The archive is not altered by this command.
Quickly appends named files to the end of the archive. q is similar to the r option except that the files will always be added to the end of the archive, rather than replacing any existing version of the file with the new version. This command will be unsupported in the near future.
Prints files to standard output.
These letters may be used with primary option letters as shown above. Options must all appear as one string without spaces:
c Suppress warning for creation of archive if it doesn't exist.
e Prefix messages with ERROR or WARNING. Equivalent to the driver option -prefixed_msgs, described in Chapter 8, "Compiler Driver Options".
s Used with t to regenerate table of contents.
S Suppress generation of table of contents.
Note: If a minus sign (-) is used as a prefix to the first option in the ax command, it is silently ignored. For example:
ax -rv libx.a file.o
ax rv libx.a file.o