How do you link to a specific version of a shared library in GCC

Question

I'm compiling some code which uses libcurl on a Debian Linux system. My dev machine is running Debian 5 but I want the binary to be usable on older Debian 4 systems too.

I find that if I specify -lcurl it will link to libcurl.so.4 but Debian 4 systems only have libcurl.so.3

Is there some way I can tell GCC to link to either libcurl.so.3 (which exists in both Debian 4 and 5) or just libcurl.so so it will use whatever version is available ?

Answer 1

You can pass the actual .so file instead of -l on the linker command line, and it ought to do what you want.

Answer 2

How about creating a symlink local to your project that links to .3, then you can just use -L at compile time. I'm not sure if you'd get a name conflict though, but you could always call it libcurl-old.so just in case.