Unix Articles & FAQ

Ideally, there is no need for ldconfig or for <?php
/etc/ld.so.conf
?>, since ELF provides good and predictable (read portable) mechanism to locate shared libraries. Unfortunately there are still a few corner cases (like wanting to run setuid binaries that you don't have the source for, that want shared libraries to be installed somewhere you don't like). For those corner cases, you'll find that creating an <?php
/etc/ld.so.conf
?> file, will still work. Read on though about other ways of doing this and why it is not a good idea. The next section discusses the ELF mechanisms for locating shared libraries.