Program Library HOWTO

David A. Wheeler

version 0.87, 22 March 2001

This HOWTO for programmers discusses how to create and use program libraries on Linux. This includes static libraries, shared libraries, and dynamically loaded libraries.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Static Libraries

3. Shared Libraries

3.1. Conventions

3.1.1. Shared Library Names
3.1.2. Filesystem Placement

3.2. How Libraries are Used

3.3. Environment Variables

3.4. Creating a Shared Library

3.5. Installing and Using a Shared Library

3.6. Incompatible Libraries

4. Dynamically Loaded (DL) Libraries

4.1. dlopen()
4.2. dlerror()
4.3. dlsym()
4.4. dlclose()
4.5. DL Library Example

5. Miscellaneous

5.1. nm command
5.2. Special functions _init and _fini
5.3. Shared Libraries Can Be Scripts
5.4. GNU libtool
5.5. Removing symbols for space
5.6. Extremely small executables

6. More Examples

6.1. File libhello.c
6.2. File libhello.h
6.3. File demo_use.c
6.4. File script_static
6.5. File script_shared
6.6. File demo_dynamic.c
6.7. File script_dynamic

7. Other Information Sources

8. Copyright and License

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		Introduction