Question

Recently I got a test binary. When I checked it using objdump, I observed that it includes hard coded library path. Why it is needed to to hardcode the path like that? Shouldn’t the path be taken from SHELL environment variables or -L parameter instead ?

objdump -p testprog

The output includes the hardcoded path to shared libraries:

....
  NEEDED      /home/test/lib/liba.so
  NEEDED      /home/test/lib/libb.so
  NEEDED      /home/test/lib/libc.so
....

Answer 1

This is probably because those three .so files had no SONAME on the host where your test program was built. Tell the person who built it to rebuild liba.so with -Wl,soname,liba.so and similar for the other two, then relink the main program.