linux - Gurus say that LD_LIBRARY_PATH is bad - what's the alternative?

Question

I read some articles about problems in using the LD_LIBRARY_PATH, even as a part of a wrapper script:

http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Admin/ld-lib-path.html

http://blogs.oracle.com/ali/entry/avoiding_ld_library_path_the

In this case - what are the recommended alternatives?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can try adding:

-Wl,-rpath,path/to/lib

to the linker options. This will save you the need to worry about the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable, and you can decide at compile time to point to a specific library.

For a path relative to the binary, you can use $ORIGIN, eg

-Wl,-rpath,'$ORIGIN/../lib'

($ORIGIN may not work when statically linking to shared libraries with ld, use -Wl,--allow-shlib-undefined to fix this)