Question

I’ve figured out which .so files are needed by my program to work on other machines, but I’m not sure what I need to do with them to make sure that my program will find them and link with them on execution.

I know that on Windows platforms I can just dump the .dll files in the directory of the executable and be done with it. This doesn’t seem to be the case on Linux, though.

$ ls
libjrtp.so.3.9.1  libjthread.so.1.3.1  libQtCore.so.4  libQtGui.so.4  streamer
$ ./streamer 
./streamer: error while loading shared libraries: libjrtp.so.3.9.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I find it odd that the program can’t link with the library even though it’s basically sitting right there in the working directory. Why isn’t it linking?

Answer 1

It’s probably not linking because . isn’t in the RPATH of your binary (You can use -R to set this). Unix systems don’t look in the current directory for needed files like Windows does/used to do. You can confirm this with ldd ./binary.