Specify which library (.so) file to use

Question

On a Linux machine I have a Python (PySide) program that needs libQtWebkit.so as library. By default it uses the system-wide installed version found in /usr/lib. However, this is not the correct version of this library.

The program has its own custom version of the libQtWebkit.so file, which it needs to use. But I don't want to install this custom libary file system-wide into /usr/lib.

So my question is: How can I tell the Python program to use a specific (local) .so file instead of the globally installed one?

Answer 1

You can use LD_LIBRARY_PATH to tell the loader were to look first for shared libraries.

If the .so is in the current directory, you can invoke python as follows:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=.:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH python

See shared libraries howto