LD cannot find an existing library

Am attempting to link an application with G ++ on this Debian Lenny system. LD is complaining it cannot find specified libraries. the specific example here is ImageMagick, but I am having similar problems with a few other libraries too.

I am calling the linker:

g++ -w (..lots of .o files/include directories/etc..) \ -L/usr/lib -lmagic 

LD complains:

/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lmagic 

However, libmagic exists:

$ locate libmagic.so /usr/lib/libmagic.so.1 /usr/lib/libmagic.so.1.0.0 $ ls -all /usr/lib/libmagic.so.1* lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    17 2008-12-01 03:52 /usr/lib/libmagic.so.1 -> libmagic.so.1.0.0 -rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 84664 2008-09-09 00:05 /usr/lib/libmagic.so.1.0.0 $ ldd /usr/lib/libmagic.so.1.0.0      linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xb7f85000)     libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1 (0xb7f51000)     libc.so.6 => /lib/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 (0xb7df6000)     /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7f86000) $ sudo ldconfig -v | grep "libmagic"     libmagic.so.1 -> libmagic.so.1.0.0 

How do I diagnose this problem further, and what cocould be wrong? Am I doing something completely stupid?

 

The problem is the linker is looking for libmagic. So but you only have libmagic. so.1

A quick hack is to symlink libmagic. so.1 to libmagic. So

 

 

That works, I am kind of perplexed that it wocould name the file in a completely useless way by default-can you provide any insight why it wocould do this by default? -Maxpenguin
Dec 3 '08

Most likely it is a misconfiguration of the install script-grespondawk
Dec 3 '08

The Foo. so.1 is a symlink to foo. so.1.0.0 too. this way, you can have several versions of a library in your system, and if an application needs a specific one, it can link to it, while in general, the newest one is chosen
Symlink. I do not know why this symlink was missing.-Svante
Dec 3 '08

Libmagic. so.1 is the soname, used by the dynamic linker; libmagic. so is used by the linker, and is usually together with the headers in the-dev package. the symlink might be missing because the-dev package was not installed.
-Cesarb
Dec 3 '08