Mystery of /etc/ld.so.conf + ldconfig

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm ,
I tried to sleep but fortunately I was n't able to have a good time sleep. May be coz I had a looooong sleeeeeeeeep today eve. What to do other than sleeping on New Year Day.

Itz soooooooooooooooo lazy without doing anything interesting. Since I'm not getting my sleep mood I thought to write something interesting...............................

I thought to write about this as well in my blogger couple of days back since it'll be useful for someone who'll need to tackle simple problems.

Ok as usual I'm gonna talk about something regarding to linux environment. Today I'd like to tell something about ldconfig command and the file /etc/ld.so.conf

These two r very important if you re always doing source level compilations.

/etc/ld.so.conf file holds the locations where unix/linux .so files resides. (library files that comes with *nix operating system, juz like we have hell of a lot of .dll files need for various softwares run on top of windows)

sometimes a newly installed (*nix environment) softwares library file ( .so files) may copy to somewhere else other than traditional location /usr/lib/.

Then in a scenario like this may be you'll not able to run new applications which needs newly installed libraries. You'll probably getter error saying with missing .so file most of the time.

But if you run find or locate for that particular library files (.so files) you might able to locate 'em in different location other than /usr/lib/.

Therefore you have to specify the location of your library files (.so files) if they are nt in /usr/lib/ by default. Solution for this is simply add the location of your library files location to /etc/ld.so.conf and then juz run ldconfig command on a terminal, it'll update the system with new library location.

For an example I encountered this while I was building iaxmodem on a centos4 box. I juz add following line to /etc/ld.so.conf,

/usr/local/lib/

And run ldconfig on a terminal, then I didn't get any errors saying bla bla missing library files.


So as a part of debugging, sometime z this tip may be useful to you if you're frequently use *nix systems. Coz after I realized this for iaxmodem issue It helped me to clarify a similar problem with same solution.


Ok I hope this is enough about /etc/ld.so.conf and ldconfig. I hope you might have get something through this post. I'll try to post more useful hints on *nix systems in my upcoming posts.

Now I feel very sleepy. Dont know, coz of my own post. Anyway Thanks for being on my blogger

I'm going to my bed again ................................................................................


OOOooooooopz forgot to tell something about .so files. They are shared objectz ( thatz why they have .so as their extension) which usually can be used by several programs and at runtime they can dynamically load those library files and can use functions on those objectz bla bla bla.



Bye

Thanks

Pasan