For a once-off, set the variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH
to a colon-separated list of directories to search. This is analogous to PATH
for executables, except that the standard system directories are additionally searched after the ones specified through the environment.
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib64 ./cart5
If you have a program that keeps libraries in a non-standard location and isn't able to find them on its own, you can write a wrapper script:
#!/bin/sh
if [ -n "$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" ]; then
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/lib64
else
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib64
fi
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
exec /path/to/cart5 "$@"
The list of standard system directories is kept in /etc/ld.so.conf
. Recent systems allow this file to include other files; if yours contains something like include /etc/ld.so.conf.d/*.conf
, create a new file called /etc/ld.so.conf.d/mala.conf
containing the directories you want to add. After you change /etc/ld.so.conf
or an included file, run /sbin/ldconfig
for your changes to take effect (this updates a cache).
(LD_LIBRARY_PATH
also applies to many other unices, including FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris and Tru64. HP-UX has SHLIB_PATH
and Mac OS X has DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH
. /etc/ld.so.conf
has analogs on most unices but the location and syntax differs more widely.)