CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gcc
Wad
Wad

Reputation: 1534

Difference between relative path and using $ORIGIN as RPATH

Consider the two commands below for building a simple executable

$ gcc -g -Wall -Wl,--enable-new-dtags -Wl,-rpath,'$ORIGIN'/sharedLibDir -o prog main.c ./sharedLibDir/libdemo.so

$ gcc -g -Wall -Wl,--enable-new-dtags -Wl,-rpath,./sharedLibDir -o prog main.c ./sharedLibDir/libdemo.so

Clearly, one uses a local directory as the RPATH, the other uses $ORIGIN. I cannot see what the difference is between these two (apart from the value of RPATH and RUNPATH in the binary); both allow the executable to be moved around and, provided it has a parallel directory named sharedLibDir, it runs.

What is the point of $ORIGIN? Does it have some additional functionality that I have missed? Thanks in advance.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 3038

Answers (1)

pdw
pdw

Reputation: 8866

If your use $ORIGIN, the lookup is relative to the directory that contains the executable. If you specifiy a relative directory, it's relative to the current working directory, which is hardly ever what you want.

Upvotes: 7

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