Please forgive me if I’m missing something obvious here. I’m developing some applications for another platform, and all of my proprietary libraries are installed to /app/lib. To facilitate this, I specify a runtime library path for each of my binaries as “/app/lib”. This works fine; however, it requires that the path “/app/lib” exist in my build environment when linking (even though that directory is empty). I’m using NetBeans, which might be complicating matters, but I can see “-Wl, -rpath /app/lib” being passed to gcc.
I’d like to avoid the need to create an empty “/app/lib” in my build environment, but I don’t want to change the file structure on my target platform. If I delete /app/lib from the build environment, I get an error when building that it can’t be found. Is there a way to specify a runtime search path without the need for it to exist at link time?
The syntax should be “-Wl,-rpath -Wl,/app/lib” (“-Wl,-rpath,/app/lib” works too). This is a bug in NetBeans. The reason why it’s not more critical (and why I didn’t notice this before) is that link-time search paths appear to carry over into runtime. Because NetBeans isn’t placing a comma between -rpath and /app/lib, /app/lib is being interpreted as a link-time search path. As a result, my dependent libraries are still found at run-time in the appropriate location, but because it’s a link-time dependency, the linking fails because /app/lib doesn’t exist.