Researching the Dynamic Loader on Any System

In finding information about the dynamic loader and shared libraries in general, there are several places to look. The obvious Internet location is Google; however, the system itself has a lot of information about shared libraries if one only knows where to look.

The first place is the information on the dynamic loader’s man page. Unfortunately, most loaders have names that are unique among their UNIX peers (Linux is almost universal). You can start by looking at the /lib directory for a program containing the string “ld” (or perhaps, “dl”). On Linux, this produces:

# ls -d *ld*
ld-2.6.so ld-linux.so.2

The proper Linux loader is ld-linux.so.

On HP-UX, this produces:

# ls -d *ld*
dld.sl* libdld.2* libldap_send.1*
libdld.0@ libdld.sl@ libldap_send.sl@
libdld.1* libldap.sl@ libnss_ldap.1*

Here, the proper loader is dld.sl.

Looking at the man pages for ld-linux.so or dld.sl or whatever was found gives a vast amount of information directly related to the dynamic loader and how it loads shared libraries, as well as debugging tools to report on how the libraries are found and loaded.

This man page will also mention utilities that will help you manipulate shared libraries. For example, the Linux man page for ld-linux.so mentions ldconfig(8); the HP-UX man page for dld.sl mentions the utilities fastbind(8) and chatr(8).

There are other utilities that remain fairly generic and which can help, though these tend to be specific to machines that are configured for development. If the development tools are not loaded, these tools may be missing. These utilities may include:

• ldd – list libraries used by a binary
• nm – list symbols from program binaries and/or libraries
• objdump – display information from binaries and/or libraries
• readelf – display information from ELF-formatted binaries

Always look at the SEE ALSO section in order find more information.