Dynamic Libraries Finder Version 1.1

• Introduction
• Installation
• Microsoft Windows
• Linux
• Mac OS/X
• How to use DLF
• Command Line Options
• DLF Configuration File
• Technical Information
• Platform
• Supported Binaries
• The PEI format
• The ELF format
• The MACH-O format
• DLF License

The Dynamic Libraries Finder tool, or DLF in short, was created out of a need for a tool to automatically determine what dynamic libraries are required for a software product to run.

As a software company, we often create new products. In order to develop these products, with time, we have created a large set of libraries. Yet, each product has different needs and some do require only a very small set of these libraries. For this reason, we do not need to create a package of 50 libraries, if the product being sold really only require 5 of those.

DLF is used for that purpose. It reads the list of dynamic libraries necessary by your product, and gives you that list in your standard output. It is recursive so if your product P needs library L and library L needs library Q, then DLF will tell you that P, L and Q are required. With a simple script, you can now copy all the files in a repository used to generate a package for that product! This way, your repository will be greatly optimized in size with the least efforts.

DLF is available for Microsoft Windows, Linux and Mac OS/X. It works on all three platforms and on all three platforms it supports all three types of binaries: PEI, ELF and MACH-O. In other words, you can install DLF on Linux and run it to determine the libraries necessary under MS-Windows or Mac OS/X. Similarly, you can use the MS-Windows version to determine what Linux libraries are required.

Simply extract the files in a folder. You may want to create a folder named DLF under C:\Program Files and extract the files there. The doc folder includes the copyrights and some documentation for the different libraries. It also includes this HTML documentation. Depending on your use, you may want to add the bin folder to your PATH variable.

This image shows you how to edit your PATH variable on a Microsoft Windows 2000 system. Newer systems have slightly different windows, but the names of the buttons are the same. Note that the PATH variable is a system variable and thus you should not create a PATH variable in the User Variable set of variables.

The Linux distribution includes the files in a tarball that can directly be extracted in / (the root folder). You probably want to check the files that are in the tarball first:

  build-server# tar tzvf dlf_1.1-m2osw1_linux-i386.tar.gz

If you cannot or simply prefer to use the tool in your home environment, extract the tarball in your home directory and try running usr/bin/dlf-local. This is a shell script that tries to setup the proper LD_LIBRARY_PATH for you. Feel free to edit this script to make it work under your system.

You will otherwise need to add the path to the libraries in your LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. If you need this to work permanently, edit your .profile, .bash_rc or .bash_profile startup file and use something like the following:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/alexis/dlf-1.1/usr/lib/mo/1.3.0/lib

Note: in case you need more than one path in your LD_LIBRARY_PATH, separate them by a colon (:) character.

Similarly, you can setup your PATH variable to automatically find the binary under usr/bin. You can also copy the dlf binary or dlf-local script under your personal ~/bin folder if you have one. Then tweak the necessary variable to make it all functional.

The Mac OS/X distribution is the same as the Linux distribution. You are expected to extract the tarball in your root folder (/). Please, read the information about the Linux installation for more information.

Note that under Mac OS/X, it is not always necessary to change your LD_LIBRARY_PATH since the dynamic library loader checks the current folder too. Thus, if you choose to install dlf in your ~/bin or some other folder, you can simply copy the dlf binary and then all the libraries from:

  dlf-1.1/usr/lib/mo/1.3.0/lib/*.dylib

in that folder.

DLF is a command line tool that accepts a few command line options and can load a configuration file describing how to find the necessary dynamic libraries.

The supported command line options are described below. You can use --help to get a list of these options from DLF itself.

The DLF configuration file is composed of one or more variables. These variables define the different parameters that the DLF tool need to use to discover the dynamically loaded libraries used by a library and an executable.

The syntax is very basic: <variable name> = <value>.

Note that the variable name cannot include spaces. Some variable names use an underscore. Spaces added before and/or after the equal sign are ignored.

The value of a variable must be written on a single line. At this time there is no feature available to allow you to break up lines. It is a good idea to use an editor that will not break up lines and can show you lines wrapping around. Under Microsoft Windows, this would be NotePad. On all systems, you can use gvim for that purpose.

The following describes the technical information of the Dynamic Libraries Finder. If you still have questions, do not hesitate to contact us. We will gladly answer your questions via email and on the phone.

Dynamic Libraries Finder is available for the following platforms:

¹ Do not forget that we have a 30 days money-back guarantee policy.

All the versions of Dynamic Libraries Finder (i.e. whatever the platform) can read binary and dynamic libraries files to determine the list of necessary dynamic libraries. The following table describes briefly the different binary formats that we currently support:

¹ For all the formats, we support the 32bit and 64bit versions. And of course, you have our guarantee that if you encounter any problems with a format we will either fix it or you get your money back!

Again, all of these formats are support by all the DLF versions. Thus, you can sort out Microsoft Windows binaries on your Macintosh; you can sort out your Linux files under Microsoft Windows; etc.

The PEI-i386 format is a mix between the MS-DOS and COFF formats. DLF ignore the MS-DOS program and only determines the necessary dynamic libraries as defined in the COFF area. This is the area defining the Microsoft Windows program. The format is the same for .exe and .dll files and thus both are supported with just this extension.

We support 32bit and 64bit PEI formats.

This is the modern format used by most Unix systems (Linux, FreeBSD, HP-UX, IRIX, SunOS, etc.) At this time, for sure, we support the ELF file format available under Linux 32bit and 64bit.

If you have a file you want us to check out before you purchase, send it our way and we will test it with DLF for you.

Apple Inc., when they created the Mac OS/X system, decided to switch from the FreeBSD format (COFF and ELF) to their own format. Their format is optimized so all the important information in the file can be saved at the very beginning. This is useful to load the file faster. This special format is called MACH-O. We support 32bit and 64bit MACH-O.

Our Dynamic Libraries Finder license lets all of your programmers use a copy of the DLF executable in order to develop your build system. However, you need to have one license per build system processor. If you have a build system that can run DLF concurrently on 3 computers each of which have 4 processors and you run at most one process per processor, you will need one license per processor, 12 in this example.

You can read our complete license in dlf-license.txt

This documentation is part of the DLF project Copyright © 2008 — Made to Order Software Corporation All rights reserved