debian shared library is not being loaded properly after oracle xe installation

Question

I am facing a strange problem, maybe somebody can point me to right direction.

I have an application that uses a shared library that I built back in the day, shared library is stored under /usr/lib/ folder. My application binary used to work OK with this set up. Yesterday I tried to install ORACLE-XE to my linux distro. Ran some scripts that set some environment variables. My installation failed and I had to uninstall ORACLE-XE.

When I came back to work today, I tried to run my binary just like I used to, but I've seen some errors about undefined symbol. Symbol name was related to the shared library that I used seamlessly for months. I have the same setup in other machines, I confirmed that application is still working there, so I copied application binary and shared library from other computers to the computer that I am working on, still no luck. It seemed to me that like shared library is not being loaded at all, I tried deleting the shared library and running the application one more time, I received the same error, right around the same time.

I think the oracle scripts might have mingled some of the environment variables, therefore shared library can not be loaded. I am not sure what to check next though, any suggestion would be appreciated.

Answer 1

ldd application-name helped me to identify where the shared library is being read from, it appears that there was another version of shared libary under /usr/local/lib, which was causing the issue.