The COMMON directive is used to declare common variables. A common variable is much like a global variable declared in the uninitialised data section, so that

        common intvar 4

is similar in function to

        global intvar
        section .bss
intvar  resd 1

The difference is that if more than one module defines the same common variable, then at link time those variables will be merged, and references to intvar in all modules will point at the same piece of memory.

Like GLOBAL and EXTERN, COMMON supports object-format specific extensions. For example, the obj format allows common variables to be NEAR or FAR, and the elf format allows you to specify the alignment requirements of a common variable:

        common commvar 4:near   ; works in OBJ
        common intarray 100:4   ; works in ELF: 4 byte aligned

Once again, like EXTERN and GLOBAL, the primitive form of COMMON differs from the user-level form only in that it can take only one argument at a time.