Dynamically Loaded (DL) Libraries

dlopen()

The dlopen(3) function opens a library and prepares it for use. In C its prototype is:

  void * dlopen(const char *filename, int flag);

1. A colon-separated list of directories in the user's LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable.

2. The list of libraries specified in /etc/ld.so.cache (which is generated from /etc/ld.so.conf).

3. /lib, followed by /usr/lib. Note the order here; this is the reverse of the order used by the old a.out loader. The old a.out loader, when loading a program, first searched /usr/lib, then /lib (see the man page ld.so(8)). This shouldn't normally matter, since a library should only be in one or the other directory (never both), and different libraries with the same name are a disaster waiting to happen.

If the libraries depend on each other (e.g., X depends on Y), then you need to load the dependees first (in this example, load Y first, and then X).

The return value of dlopen() is a ``handle'' that should be considered an opaque value to be used by the other DL library routines. dlopen() will return NULL if the attempt to load does not succeed, and you need to check for this. If the same library is loaded more than once with dlopen(), the same file handle is returned.

In older systems, if the library exports a routine named _init, then that code is executed before dlopen() returns. You can use this fact in your own libraries to implement initialization routines. However, libraries should not export routines named _init or _fini. Those mechanisms are obsolete, and may result in undesired behavior. Instead, libraries should export routines using the __attribute__((constructor)) and __attribute__((destructor)) function attributes (presuming you're using gcc). See the Section called Library constructor and destructor functions for more information.

dlerror()

Errors can be reported by calling dlerror(), which returns a string describing the error from the last call to dlopen(), dlsym(), or dlclose(). One oddity is that after calling dlerror(), future calls to dlerror() will return NULL until another error has been encountered.

dlsym()

There's no point in loading a DL library if you can't use it. The main routine for using a DL library is dlsym(3), which looks up the value of a symbol in a given (opened) library. This function is defined as:

 void * dlsym(void *handle, char *symbol);

dlsym() will return a NULL result if the symbol wasn't found. If you know that the symbol could never have the value of NULL or zero, that may be fine, but there's a potential ambiguity otherwise: if you got a NULL, does that mean there is no such symbol, or that NULL is the value of the symbol? The standard solution is to call dlerror() first (to clear any error condition that may have existed), then call dlsym() to request a symbol, then call dlerror() again to see if an error occurred. A code snippet would look like this:

 dlerror(); /* clear error code */
 s = (actual_type) dlsym(handle, symbol_being_searched_for);
 if ((err = dlerror()) != NULL) {
  /* handle error, the symbol wasn't found */
 } else {
  /* symbol found, its value is in s */
 }

dlclose()

The converse of dlopen() is dlclose(), which closes a DL library. The dl library maintains link counts for dynamic file handles, so a dynamic library is not actually deallocated until dlclose has been called on it as many times as dlopen has succeeded on it. Thus, it's not a problem for the same program to load the same library multiple times. If a library is deallocated, its function _fini is called (if it exists) in older libraries, but _fini is an obsolete mechanism and shouldn't be relied on. Instead, libraries should export routines using the __attribute__((constructor)) and __attribute__((destructor)) function attributes. See the Section called Library constructor and destructor functions for more information. Note: dlclose() returns 0 on success, and non-zero on error; some Linux manual pages don't mention this.

DL Library Example

Here's an example from the man page of dlopen(3). This example loads the math library and prints the cosine of 2.0, and it checks for errors at every step (recommended):

    #include <stdlib.h>
    #include <stdio.h>
    #include <dlfcn.h>

    int main(int argc, char **argv) {
        void *handle;
        double (*cosine)(double);
        char *error;

        handle = dlopen ("/lib/libm.so.6", RTLD_LAZY);
        if (!handle) {
            fputs (dlerror(), stderr);
            exit(1);
        }

        cosine = dlsym(handle, "cos");
        if ((error = dlerror()) != NULL)  {
            fputs(error, stderr);
            exit(1);
        }

        printf ("%f\n", (*cosine)(2.0));
        dlclose(handle);
    }

If this program were in a file named "foo.c", you would build the program with the following command:

    gcc -o foo foo.c -ldl