How to show all shared libraries used by executables in Linux?

Question

1. Use ldd to list shared libraries for each executable.
2. Cleanup the output
3. Sort, compute counts, sort by count

To find the answer for all executables in the "/bin" directory:

find /bin -type f -perm /a+x -exec ldd {} \; \
| grep so \
| sed -e '/^[^\t]/ d' \
| sed -e 's/\t//' \
| sed -e 's/.*=..//' \
| sed -e 's/ (0.*)//' \
| sort \
| uniq -c \
| sort -n

Change "/bin" above to "/" to search all directories.

Output (for just the /bin directory) will look something like this:

  1 /lib64/libexpat.so.0
  1 /lib64/libgcc_s.so.1
  1 /lib64/libnsl.so.1
  1 /lib64/libpcre.so.0
  1 /lib64/libproc-3.2.7.so
  1 /usr/lib64/libbeecrypt.so.6
  1 /usr/lib64/libbz2.so.1
  1 /usr/lib64/libelf.so.1
  1 /usr/lib64/libpopt.so.0
  1 /usr/lib64/librpm-4.4.so
  1 /usr/lib64/librpmdb-4.4.so
  1 /usr/lib64/librpmio-4.4.so
  1 /usr/lib64/libsqlite3.so.0
  1 /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6
  1 /usr/lib64/libz.so.1
  2 /lib64/libasound.so.2
  2 /lib64/libblkid.so.1
  2 /lib64/libdevmapper.so.1.02
  2 /lib64/libpam_misc.so.0
  2 /lib64/libpam.so.0
  2 /lib64/libuuid.so.1
  3 /lib64/libaudit.so.0
  3 /lib64/libcrypt.so.1
  3 /lib64/libdbus-1.so.3
  4 /lib64/libresolv.so.2
  4 /lib64/libtermcap.so.2
  5 /lib64/libacl.so.1
  5 /lib64/libattr.so.1
  5 /lib64/libcap.so.1
  6 /lib64/librt.so.1
  7 /lib64/libm.so.6
  9 /lib64/libpthread.so.0
 13 /lib64/libselinux.so.1
 13 /lib64/libsepol.so.1
 22 /lib64/libdl.so.2
 83 /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
 83 /lib64/libc.so.6

Edit - Removed "grep -P"

I didn't have ldd on my ARM toolchain so I used objdump:

$(CROSS_COMPILE)objdump -p

For instance:

objdump -p /usr/bin/python:

Dynamic Section:
  NEEDED               libpthread.so.0
  NEEDED               libdl.so.2
  NEEDED               libutil.so.1
  NEEDED               libssl.so.1.0.0
  NEEDED               libcrypto.so.1.0.0
  NEEDED               libz.so.1
  NEEDED               libm.so.6
  NEEDED               libc.so.6
  INIT                 0x0000000000416a98
  FINI                 0x000000000053c058
  GNU_HASH             0x0000000000400298
  STRTAB               0x000000000040c858
  SYMTAB               0x0000000000402aa8
  STRSZ                0x0000000000006cdb
  SYMENT               0x0000000000000018
  DEBUG                0x0000000000000000
  PLTGOT               0x0000000000832fe8
  PLTRELSZ             0x0000000000002688
  PLTREL               0x0000000000000007
  JMPREL               0x0000000000414410
  RELA                 0x0000000000414398
  RELASZ               0x0000000000000078
  RELAENT              0x0000000000000018
  VERNEED              0x0000000000414258
  VERNEEDNUM           0x0000000000000008
  VERSYM               0x0000000000413534

On Linux I use:

lsof -P -T -p Application_PID

This works better than ldd when the executable uses a non default loader

to learn what libraries a binary uses, use ldd

ldd path/to/the/tool

You'd have to write a little shell script to get to your system-wide breakdown.

Check shared library dependencies of a program executable

To find out what libraries a particular executable depends on, you can use ldd command. This command invokes dynamic linker to find out library dependencies of an executable.

> $ ldd /path/to/program

Note that it is NOT recommended to run ldd with any untrusted third-party executable because some versions of ldd may directly invoke the executable to identify its library dependencies, which can be security risk.

Instead, a safer way to show library dependencies of an unknown application binary is to use the following command.

$ objdump -p /path/to/program | grep NEEDED

for more info