rpath=$ORIGIN not having desired effect?

Question

I've got a binary "CeeloPartyServer" that needs to find libFoundation.so at runtime, on a FreeBSD machine. They're both in the same directory. I compile (on another platform, using a cross compiler) CeeloPartyServer using linker flag "-rpath=$ORIGIN".

> readelf -d CeeloPartyServer |grep -i rpath
 0x0000000f (RPATH)                      Library rpath: [$ORIGIN]
> ls
CeeloPartyServer    Contents        Foundation.framework    libFoundation.so
> ./CeeloPartyServer 
/libexec/ld-elf.so.1: Shared object "libFoundation.so" not found, required by "CeeloPartyServer"

Why isn't it finding the library when I try to run it? My exact linker line is: -lm -lmysql -rpath=$ORIGIN. I am pretty sure I don't have to escape \$ or anything like that since my readelf analysis does in fact show that library rpath is set to $ORIGIN. What am I missing?

Answer 1

I'm assuming you are using gcc and binutils.

If you do

readelf -d CeeloPartyServer | grep ORIGIN

You should get back the RPATH line you found above, but you should also see some entries about flags. The following is from a library that I built.

0x000000000000000f (RPATH)              Library rpath: [$ORIGIN/../lib]
0x000000000000001e (FLAGS)              ORIGIN
0x000000006ffffffb (FLAGS_1)            Flags: ORIGIN

If you aren't seeing some sort of FLAGS entries, you probably haven't told the linker to mark the object as requiring origin processing. With binutils ld, you do this by passing the -z origin flag.

I'm guessing you are using gcc to drive the link though, so in that case you will need to pass flag through the compiler by adding -Wl,-z,origin to your gcc link line.