how to check if a library is installed?

Question

In linux, how do I check if a library is installed or not? (from the command line of course).

In my specific case now, I want to check whether libjpeg is installed.

Answer 1

You can check with the package manager of your distribution (aptitude, yum, ...) but as you did not give your distribution I can't give you the right command.

Another way can be to run gcc -ljpeg, if you get 'ld: library not found for -ljpeg' it means that gcc has not found the library (but it don't mean that it's not installed), if you get something like 'Undefined symbols: "_main", referenced from: ...' it means that libjpeg has been found.

locate libjpeg; ls /usr/lib/libjpeg*; ls /lib/libjpeg* are some other way to find if the lib in installed in the system

There is many other way to check that, if you give us more context (why you need to check if libjpeg is installed) we could give you the best solution for your specific case.

Answer 2

I'm use whereis utility.
Sample:

l1feh4ck3r@xxx:~$ whereis libjpeg
libjpeg: /usr/lib/libjpeg.so /usr/lib/libjpeg.a /usr/lib/libjpeg.la

Answer 3

For deb-based distribution you can do

dpkg -s packagename

Or if you know the filename only, use

locate filename

The filename is usually libsomething.so[.version].

Answer 4

This is done by configuration tools on linux all the time.

Look at this Tutorial about autoconf and KDevelop.

Other tricks would use commands like ldconfig and dpkg.

Answer 5

On Redhat based systems, one can use pkg-config to verify if a library is installed or not. Many rpm binaries actually make the same checks before proceeding with installation, so we can reasonably rely on its veracity.

pkg-config --cflags jpeg

pkg-config --libs jpeg

pkg-config --cflags "jpeg >= 1.0.0" # for version check
pkg-config  --modversion jpeg | awk -F. '{ printf "0x%02X%02X%02X\n",$1,$2,$3 }' #version check