Linking against Shared Library, calling program without custom LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Question

I can successfully link against libawesomium-1.6.5.so :

-L-L.
-L-lawesomium-1.6.5
-L-ldl

libawesomium-1.6.5.so is in the same directory as my executable, now if I try to call my program (I'll call it prog for now), it exists with:

./prog: error while loading shared libraries: libawesomium-1.6.5.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

So I make a symlink libawesomium-1.6.5.so.0 pointing to libawesomium-1.6.5.so, running prog again gives me the same error, calling it with a custom LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./ works, but I wanna distribute prog and I want the user to be able to use prog with out root-rights (installing awesomium to /usr/lib etc.) and without the need of setting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH. One option would be a shell script which sets the LD_LIBRARY_PATH, but I would prefer a different way (I also heared setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH is a bad idea).

Furthermore, it would be great if there was no need to create the symlink to libawesomium-1.6.5.so.0.

EDIT:

Passing -rpath=. to the linker works! But unfortunatly awesomium can't deal with it:

/.../awesomium_test/AwesomiumProcess: error while loading shared libraries: libawesomium-1.6.5.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Using -rpath and setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH from inside prog works

Answer 1

If you use gcc, you can pass -Wl,-rpath=lib_directory in order to make the executable to search the libraries in the directory lib_directory.

Moreover, this argument accepts a special value $ORIGIN that represents the directory containing the executed program. So if you pass -Wl,-rpath='$ORIGIN' to gcc you will be able to keep libawesomium-1.6.5.so in the same directory than the program.

Answer 2

The error is because . is not in your path. Your options are to distribute a bash script which runs the binary with LD_LIBRARY_PATH set, as you say, or to copy the shared object to /usr/lib or /usr/local/lib or wherever suitable on that particular platform.

There is really no shortcut, unless you want to link statically.