Question

I was comparing files on two systems I thought should be identical, and noticed /lib64/libcrypto.so.0.9.8e was different. These are CentOS 5.x systems. Lots of other libs are different too, which surprised me. For this file, as the example, the rpm versions are the same, and rpm -qV shows the files as unmodified.

System 1:

# ls -la /lib64/libcrypto.so.0.9.8e
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1364912 May 29 17:28 /lib64/libcrypto.so.0.9.8e*
# rpm -qf /lib64/libcrypto.so.0.9.8e
openssl-0.9.8e-22.el5_8.4
# rpm -qV openssl-0.9.8e-22.el5_8.4 | less
... output does not list this file

System 2:

# ls -la /lib64/libcrypto.so.0.9.8e
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1367232 May 29 17:28 /lib64/libcrypto.so.0.9.8e*
# rpm -qf lib64/libcrypto.so.0.9.8e
openssl-0.9.8e-22.el5_8.4
# rpm -qV openssl-0.9.8e-22.el5_8.4 | less
... output does not list this file

I’m really not getting this. Are these files relinked, or rebuilt, or stripped or something when they’re installed? Looking for any explanations or suggestions on what to check next. Thanks!

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Edit: thank you @IgnacioVazquez-Abrams. For anyone else finding this, it’s a cron job: /etc/cron.daily/prelink.

Answer 1

They’re prelinked, which speeds up loading. The rpmdb is updated with the new information about the existing file.