Show all libraries used by executables on linux

Question

I'd like to know which libraries are used by executables on my system. More specifically, I'd like to rank which libraries are used the most, along with the binaries that use them. How can I do this?

Answer 1

to learn what libraries a binary uses, use ldd

ldd path/to/the/tool

You'd have to write a little shell script to get to your system-wide breakdown.

Answer 2

1. Use "ldd" to list shared libraries for each executable.
2. Cleanup the output
3. Sort, compute counts, sort by count

To find the answer for all executables in the "/bin" directory:

find /bin -type f -perm /a+x -exec ldd {} \; \
| grep so \
| sed -e '/^[^\t]/ d' \
| sed -e 's/\t//' \
| sed -e 's/.*=..//' \
| sed -e 's/ (0.*)//' \
| sort \
| uniq -c \
| sort -n

Change "/bin" above to "/" to search all directories.

Output (for just the /bin directory) will look something like this:

  1 /lib64/libexpat.so.0
  1 /lib64/libgcc_s.so.1
  1 /lib64/libnsl.so.1
  1 /lib64/libpcre.so.0
  1 /lib64/libproc-3.2.7.so
  1 /usr/lib64/libbeecrypt.so.6
  1 /usr/lib64/libbz2.so.1
  1 /usr/lib64/libelf.so.1
  1 /usr/lib64/libpopt.so.0
  1 /usr/lib64/librpm-4.4.so
  1 /usr/lib64/librpmdb-4.4.so
  1 /usr/lib64/librpmio-4.4.so
  1 /usr/lib64/libsqlite3.so.0
  1 /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6
  1 /usr/lib64/libz.so.1
  2 /lib64/libasound.so.2
  2 /lib64/libblkid.so.1
  2 /lib64/libdevmapper.so.1.02
  2 /lib64/libpam_misc.so.0
  2 /lib64/libpam.so.0
  2 /lib64/libuuid.so.1
  3 /lib64/libaudit.so.0
  3 /lib64/libcrypt.so.1
  3 /lib64/libdbus-1.so.3
  4 /lib64/libresolv.so.2
  4 /lib64/libtermcap.so.2
  5 /lib64/libacl.so.1
  5 /lib64/libattr.so.1
  5 /lib64/libcap.so.1
  6 /lib64/librt.so.1
  7 /lib64/libm.so.6
  9 /lib64/libpthread.so.0
 13 /lib64/libselinux.so.1
 13 /lib64/libsepol.so.1
 22 /lib64/libdl.so.2
 83 /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
 83 /lib64/libc.so.6

Edit - Removed "grep -P"

Answer 3

With ldd you can get the libraries that tools use. To rank the usage of libraries for a set of tool you can use something like the following command.

ldd /bin/* /usr/bin/* ... | sed -e '/^[^\t]/ d; s/^\t\(.* => \)\?\([^ ]*\) (.*/\2/g' | sort | uniq -c

(Here sed strips all lines that do not start with a tab and the filters out only the actual libraries. With sort | uniq -c you get each library with a count indicating the number of times it occurred.)

You might want to add sort -g at the end to get the libraries in order of usage.

Note that you probably get lines two non-library lines with the above command. One of static executables ("not a dynamic executable") and one without any library. The latter is the result of linux-gate.so.1 which is not a library in your file system but one "supplied" by the kernel.