Error while loading shared library: libglfw.so.3?

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1

Hi
I’m learning opengl and so i’m trying to get a project setup with glfw and glew on linux but im having some issues.

This is how i went about installing glfw: I first cloned the glfw repository from github and then installed the dependencies using the following command: sudo apt install xorg-dev

I then went in to the glfw folder and typed: cmake -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON .
This generated a makefile. I then typed: make all & make install.

I then wrote a small c++ program that just consist of main and a call to glfwInit(), nothing else.
When i compile the program using the following command: g++ mainer.cpp -Wall -lglfw
I get no errors, but when i try to run it i get the following: ./a.out: error while loading shared libraries: libglfw.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Oddly enough, when i remove the glfwInit() call, it works fine?

Does anybody know what is going on and what i’m doing wrong for this to happen?

Thank in advance!

2

On Linux .so shared libraries are not loaded from current folder like .dll files on Windows.
They are loaded only from specific locations on your system, like /usr/lib or similar.

To override location where to load .so files, you can use LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. Just set it to location where libglfw.so.3 file is, like this:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/directory ./your_executable

Alternative approach is to modify binary you are building to make it load shared library from current folder. You can do that with $ORIGIN feature of dynamic library loader: http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/ld.so.8.html
Basically you need to pass extra -Wl,-rpath,'$ORIGIN' argument to gcc. Make sure it does not expand $ORIGIN, it must have $ sign there. This will make ld to search for libraries in same folder as executable.

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