Question

What is the easiest way to verify boost has been installed? I did try to manually find the files but being a Linux newbie I wasn’t able to.

I wasn’t sure if there was a one-line command check?

Answer 1

You can try to compile a simple program:

#include <boost/shared_ptr.hpp>

int main() { }

You can also look for the boost header files in /usr/include/boost/, and perhaps also in /usr/local/include/ in case someone has installed a local (non-distribution) version.

Parallelly, you can/need to check /usr/lib (or /usr/local/lib) for the compiled libraries that go with Boost such as libboost_system.so.

If you know cmake, you can check out its FindBoost module to see what sort of checks they do to discover the location of a potential boost installation.