Question

I have a header file, for example “elf.h” or name of method, for example “ElfData::addToSection()”.

I’d like to know the corresponding library file – the name of it and it’s location, for example /usr/lib/libelf.a, or /usr/lib/libelf.so.0.8.13.
What are the ways to solve this problem. And what is the best way.

Also i’d like to know what headers, functions match to specified library file.
Operational system = Ubuntu Linux.

May be, these questions are stupid 🙂
but I would appreciate it if you could reply.

Answer 1

For newer libraries, you can often use the pkg-config tool. You give this the name of the package you want to link with and it gives you the appropriate compiler/linker options:

$ pkg-config --cflags glib-2.0
-I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/glib-2.0/include
$ pkg-config --libs glib-2.0
-lglib-2.0

so that you can put this in your Makefile:

LIBS = `pkg-config --libs glib-2.0` -lm      # link with glib and libm
CFLAGS = -O2 `pkg-config --cflags glib-2.0`

(It won’t find the headers for you, just the include dirs.)

For libraries that do not support pkg-config, there’s no single correct way of finding out the header that a library belongs to or vice versa. You normally either hand-code this knowledge into your build system, or use something like the GNU autotools that allow checking multiple libraries/headers for the identifiers or symbols you need.