Linker and Libraries Guide

Environment Variables

The link-editor and runtime linker support a number of environment variables that begin with the characters LD_, for example LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Each environment variable can exist in its generic form, or can be specified with a _32 or _64 suffix, for example LD_LIBRARY_PATH_64. This suffix makes the environment variable specific, respectively, to 32–bit or 64–bit processes. This suffix also overrides any generic, non-suffixed, version of the environment variable that might be in effect.

Note –

Prior to the Solaris 10 release, the link-editor and runtime linker ignored environment variables that were specified without a value. Therefore, in the following example, the generic environment variable setting, /opt/lib, would have been used to search for the dependencies of the 32–bit application prog.

$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/lib  LD_LIBRARY_PATH_32=  prog

Beginning with the Solaris 10 release, environment variables specified without a value that have a _32 or _64 suffix are processed. These environment variables effectively cancel any associated generic environment variable setting. Thus in the previous example, /opt/lib will not be used to search for the dependencies of the 32–bit application prog.

Throughout this document, any reference to link-editor environment variables uses the generic, non-suffixed, variant. All supported environment variables are defined in ld(1) and ld.so.1(1).