dlopen
DLOPEN(3) Linux Programmer's Manual DLOPEN(3)
NAME
dlclose, dlerror, dlopen, dlsym - Programming interface to dynamic
linking loader.
SYNOPSIS
#include <dlfcn.h>
void *dlopen(const char *filename, int flag);
const char *dlerror(void);
void *dlsym(void *handle, char *symbol);
int dlclose(void *handle);
Special symbols: _init, _fini.
DESCRIPTION
dlopen loads a dynamic library from the file named by the null termi-
nated string filename and returns an opaque "handle" for the dynamic
library. If filename is not an absolute path (i.e., it does not begin
with a "/"), then the file is searched for in the following locations:
A colon-separated list of directories in the user's
LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable.
The list of libraries cached in /etc/ld.so.cache.
/lib, followed by /usr/lib.
If filename is a NULL pointer, then the returned handle is for the main
program.
External references in the library are resolved using the libraries in
that library's dependency list and any other libraries previously
opened with the RTLD_GLOBAL flag. If the executable was linked with
the flag "-rdynamic", then the global symbols in the executable will
also be used to resolve references in a dynamically loaded library.
flag must be either RTLD_LAZY, meaning resolve undefined symbols as
code from the dynamic library is executed, or RTLD_NOW, meaning resolve
all undefined symbols before dlopen returns, and fail if this cannot be
done. Optionally, RTLD_GLOBAL may be or'ed with flag, in which case
the external symbols defined in the library will be made available to
subsequently loaded libraries.
If the library exports a routine named _init, then that code is exe-
cuted before dlopen returns. If the same library is loaded twice with
dlopen(), the same file handle is returned. The dl library maintains
link counts for dynamic file handles, so a dynamic library is not deal-
located until dlclose has been called on it as many times as dlopen has
succeeded on it.
If dlopen fails for any reason, it returns NULL. A human readable
string describing the most recent error that occurred from any of the
dl routines (dlopen, dlsym or dlclose) can be extracted with dlerror().
dlerror returns NULL if no errors have occurred since initialization or
since it was last called. (Calling dlerror() twice consecutively, will
always result in the second call returning NULL.)
dlsym takes a "handle" of a dynamic library returned by dlopen and the
null terminated symbol name, returning the address where that symbol is
loaded. If the symbol is not found, dlsym returns NULL; however, the
correct way to test for an error from dlsym is to save the result of
dlerror into a variable, and then check if saved value is not NULL.
This is because the value of the symbol could actually be NULL. It is
also necessary to save the results of dlerror into a variable because
if dlerror is called again, it will return NULL.
There are two special pseudo-handles, RTLD_DEFAULT and RTLD_NEXT. The
former will find the first occurrence of the desired symbol using the
default library search order. The latter, which is usable only from
within a dynamic library, will find the next occurrence of a function
in the search order after the current library. This allows one to pro-
vide a wrapper around a function in another shared library.
dlclose decrements the reference count on the dynamic library handle
handle. If the reference count drops to zero and no other loaded
libraries use symbols in it, then the dynamic library is unloaded. If
the dynamic library exports a routine named _fini, then that routine is
called just before the library is unloaded.
RETURN VALUE
dlclose returns 0 on success, and non-zero on error.
EXAMPLE
Load the math library, and print the cosine of 2.0:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <dlfcn.h>
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
void *handle;
double (*cosine)(double);
char *error;
handle = dlopen ("libm.so", RTLD_LAZY);
if (!handle) {
fprintf (stderr, "%s\n", dlerror());
exit(1);
}
cosine = dlsym(handle, "cos");
if ((error = dlerror()) != NULL) {
fprintf (stderr, "%s\n", error);
exit(1);
}
printf ("%f\n", (*cosine)(2.0));
dlclose(handle);
return 0;
}
If this program were in a file named "foo.c", you would build the pro-
gram with the following command:
gcc -rdynamic -o foo foo.c -ldl
NOTES
The symbols RTLD_DEFAULT and RTLD_NEXT are defined by <dlfcn.h> only
when _GNU_SOURCE was defined before including it.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The dlopen interface standard comes from Solaris. The Linux dlopen
implementation was primarily written by Eric Youngdale with help from
Mitch D'Souza, David Engel, Hongjiu Lu, Andreas Schwab and others. The
manual page was written by Adam Richter.
SEE ALSO
ld(1), ld.so(8), ldconfig(8), ldd(1), ld.so.info
Linux 2001-12-14 DLOPEN(3)
