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Asked: 2026-06-08T16:32:41+00:00

I need to ship a product with shared libraries (Ubuntu) in a folder I’ve

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I need to ship a product with shared libraries (Ubuntu) in a folder I’ve created (‘shared’) within the project directory–i.e., shared libraries that are not in /usr/lib, /usr/local/lib, etc. To this end I’ve done this in the .pro file, i.e.

LIBS += -Lshared/gsl -lgsl -lgsl_cblas

NB the executable is in the same directory asy the ‘shared’ folder. Everything works when I launch the program in debug mode from QtCreator. In addition the program fails to launch if I remove or rename the libs in ‘shared’, and also I’ve verified that the app is not finding these libraries anywhere else. But when I launch from the command line, I get

error while loading shared libraries: libgslcblas.so.0: cannot open
shared object file: No such file or directory

What’s going on?

EDIT: The solution is a variation on lionbest’s below, as developed in the comments. For some reason, it turns out that on my platform qmake/QMAKE_FLAGS only allows a specific format for linker options, and not the one you find googling around for other instances where people have worked with QMAKE_FLAGS. Namely,

QMAKE_FLAGS += "-Wl,-rpath,\'\$$ORIGIN/shared/gsl\'"
QMAKE_LFLAGS_RPATH=

Specifically, the problem was that the parser (or linker) would not accept -rpath=..., despite the fact that this seems to work for everyone else. Ubuntu 12.04, gcc 4.6.3, Qt 4.8.0, QtCreator 2.4.1 “based on Qt 4.7.4”. Hope this experience can save someone else the same frustration.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Start a program with environmental variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH=shared/gsl or add a RPATH to linker settings:

    LIBS += -Wl,-rpath=shared/gsl

    If you want to make shortcut for your application, most distribution (based on Gnome, KDE, LXDE and XFCE) use a .desktop file. QtCreator probably generated one for you. You need to edit it or generate it, and put to $HOME/.local/applications or /usr/share/applications/ during installation. In desktop file you could add envirometal varible and starting directory as follow:

    Exec=/usr/bin/env LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/<path_to_libs>/ /<path>/app -extra_options

    If you need to run your application in specific directory add line:

    Path=/<path_to_your_application_working_dir>

    You can use ${} inside path.

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