ldconfig error: is not a symbolic link

Question

When running:

    sudo /sbin/ldconfig

the following error appears:

    /sbin/ldconfig: /usr/local/lib/ is not a symbolic link

When I run file:

    file /usr/local/lib/
    /usr/local/lib/: directory

Inside /usr/local/lib/ there are three libraries that I use. I'll call them here as lib1, lib2 and lib3.

Now, when I do an ldd on my binary it results:

    lib1.so => not found
    lib2.so => not found
    lib3.so => /usr/local/lib/lib3.so (0x00216000)

But all of then are in the same folder as /usr/local/lib/{lib1,lib2,lib3}.so.

Every time I run ldconfig, the same error appears:

/usr/local/lib/ is not a symbolic link

I thought /usr/local/lib should be declared twice in /etc/ld.conf.d/*.conf, but not:

    sudo egrep '\/usr\/local' /etc/ld.so.conf.d/*
    projectA.conf.old:/usr/local/projectA/lib
    local.conf:/usr/local/lib

ld.so.conf only includes /etc/ld.so.conf.d/*.conf, so this *.old isn't processed, and it refers to /usr/local/projectA/lib.

After a time tring I deleted all lib1 and lib2 (at some point I tested it on binary's folder), the same error occurs.

Answer 1

I ran into this issue with the Oracle 11R2 client. Not sure if the Oracle installer did this or someone did it here before i arrived. It was not 64-bit vs 32-bit, all was 64-bit.

The error was that libexpat.so.1 was not a symbolic link.

It turned out that there were two identical files, libexpat.so.1.5.2 and libexpat.so.1. Removing the offending file and making it a symlink to the 1.5.2 version caused the error to go away.

Makes sense that you'd want the well-known name to be a symlink to the current version. If you do this, it's less likely that you'll end up with a stale library.