Ld not finding library installed in /usr/local/lib

Developer Discussion
1

I’m working on building an application from source. After manually building one of the dependencies (chromaprint GitHub - acoustid/chromaprint: C library for generating audio fingerprints used by AcoustID) it gets installed into /usr/local/lib:

    $ ls -lah /usr/local/lib/libchromaprint.so*
    lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root   19 May 27 08:44 /usr/local/lib/libchromaprint.so -> libchromaprint.so.1
    lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root   23 May 27 08:44 /usr/local/lib/libchromaprint.so.1 -> libchromaprint.so.1.4.4
    -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1.9M May 27 10:13 /usr/local/lib/libchromaprint.so.1.4.4

I’ve created a conf file under /etc/ld.so.conf.d:

    $ cat /etc/ld.so.conf.d/local.conf 
    /usr/local/lib

However ld apparently still can’t find the library:

    $ ld -lchromaprint --verbose
    /snipped/
    ==================================================
    ld: mode elf_x86_64
    attempt to open /usr/x86_64-generic-linux/lib64/libchromaprint.so failed
    attempt to open /usr/x86_64-generic-linux/lib64/libchromaprint.a failed
    attempt to open /usr/lib64/libchromaprint.so failed
    attempt to open /usr/lib64/libchromaprint.a failed
    attempt to open /usr/lib32/libchromaprint.so failed
    attempt to open /usr/lib32/libchromaprint.a failed
    attempt to open /usr/lib/libchromaprint.so failed
    attempt to open /usr/lib/libchromaprint.a failed
    attempt to open /usr/x86_64-generic-linux/lib/libchromaprint.so failed
    attempt to open /usr/x86_64-generic-linux/lib/libchromaprint.a failed
    ld: cannot find -lchromaprint

Is there something I’m missing here in making sure ld is looking in /usr/local/lib as well? I guess it could also be an issue with the application I’m trying to build that it isn’t looking in /usr/local/lib…but that seems like an obvious place to include for dependency libraries.

Any help would be appreciated.

2

Read man stateless. It explains how to make applications see libraries in /usr/local:

echo "/usr/local/lib" | sudo tee -a /etc/ld.so.conf

Then run sudo ldconfig at least once.

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3

Yeah, so there should be no practical difference between putting the “/usr/local/lib” line directly in /etc/ld.so.conf, given that my ld.so.conf has the following:

/etc $ cat ld.so.conf
include /etc/ld.so.conf.d/*.conf

However, I did as asked, so now it looks like this:

/etc $ cat ld.so.conf
include /etc/ld.so.conf.d/*.conf
/usr/local/lib

For good measure I ran ldconfig again:
$ sudo ldconfig

And, as expected, same as before (since nothing really changed about my ld config):

$ ld -lchromaprint
ld: cannot find -lchromaprint

So, why isn’t ld looking in the places its been told to?

 $ ld -lchromaprint --verbose
//snip
SEARCH_DIR("/usr/x86_64-generic-linux/lib64"); SEARCH_DIR("/usr/lib64"); SEARCH_DIR("/usr/lib32"); SEARCH_DIR("/usr/lib"); SEARCH_DIR("/usr/x86_64-generic-linux/lib");
//snip
ld: mode elf_x86_64
attempt to open /usr/x86_64-generic-linux/lib64/libchromaprint.so failed
attempt to open /usr/x86_64-generic-linux/lib64/libchromaprint.a failed
attempt to open /usr/lib64/libchromaprint.so failed
attempt to open /usr/lib64/libchromaprint.a failed
attempt to open /usr/lib32/libchromaprint.so failed
attempt to open /usr/lib32/libchromaprint.a failed
attempt to open /usr/lib/libchromaprint.so failed
attempt to open /usr/lib/libchromaprint.a failed
attempt to open /usr/x86_64-generic-linux/lib/libchromaprint.so failed
attempt to open /usr/x86_64-generic-linux/lib/libchromaprint.a failed
ld: cannot find -lchromaprint

Clearly ld isn’t looking where I expect it to based on the configuration I have set. Is there something else that overrides or takes precedence?

4

So I read though the code this weekend and I can’t even find any reference to include being valid in the man pages for ldconfig and ld.so. This really surprised me so I ended up reading the actual glibc code to figure out whether include is even valid to begin with.

From what I can see, include is valid but I don’t see any code using glob or similar expanding wildcards. This confirms my suspicion that it’s the include word in the ld.so.conf file in your case that makes it just … not work at all.

Try removing the include line altogether and following the directions from man stateless - this does appear to work.

As for why this isn’t working - I don’t know yet. However it is certainly annoying and I’d even want /etc/ld.so.conf.d/*.conf to work without even having /etc/ld.so.conf to begin with, so I think this is going to take some investigation and patching to make this much more friendly…

5

Welp, I don’t know what is going on here, but, I have no issues doing this:

# cat /etc/ld.so.conf
include /etc/ld.so.conf.d/*.conf
# cat /etc/ld.so.conf.d/local.conf 
/usr/local/lib
# ldconfig
# ldconfig -p | grep local
	libwhich.so.0 (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/local/lib/libwhich.so.0
<snip>

It… just works, sorry. (29690)

6

The simplest explanation is that you forgot to run ldconfig at some point… BTW, I would rely on ldconfig -p before ld -llib since that will produce many odd error messages if you’re not actually linking anything sane and help you debug the layer below the linker.

7

Except, as I showed above, I’ve run it a half dozen times since updating the config. I ran the commands in the order I showed in my above post, including running ldconfig right prior to trying to have ld find the library I’m looking for.

Anything else I should do to try to diagnose why it looks like my config isn’t getting picked up?

8

Yeah, I don’t know otherwise either.

You could inspect the output of ldconfig -p, as noted. You could remove the include line and just add the location of the libraries. Running ld -llib doesn’t actually do anything useful and will produce error messages even if lib is a valid library, so I would shy away from using that method to query the ld cache, especially since there’s a command made explicitly for it.

9

Is LD_LIBRARY_PATH set? If not, should it be?

10

There should not be a need to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH. You can, but it would be orthogonal to ld.so.conf.

11

I just joined because I compiled some stuff from source last night and had the EXACT same problem. In /etc.ld.so.conf I have

Include /etc/ld.so.conf.d/*.conf
/usr/local/lib64

and, in local.conf in /etc/ld.so.conf.d I have
/usr/local/lib64

and the libraries aren’t being picked up. If I type

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib64

then the libraries are found until the computer is shut down or rebooted. I’ve run sudo ldconfig multiple times. I’ll try the suggestion from the stateless manpage this evening, but it doesn’t seem to do anything differently than what I did manually.

My apologies if there are any errors. I typed this on my phone

12

It seems the instructions given in man stateless work. Delete local.conf, delete ld.so.conf and using those instructions seems to work.

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