ld unable to find existing library

Question

I want to link my application with g++ on a debian system. But for sum reason ld cannot find the specified libraries. One such library is ImageMagick, but this is persistent with a few other libraries too.

I'm using linker:

g++ -w (..lots of .o files/include directories/etc..) \
-L/usr/lib -lmagic 

ld error:

/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lmagic

But, as you can see here, lib magic is present:

$ locate libmagic.so
/usr/lib/libmagic.so.1
/usr/lib/libmagic.so.1.0.0
$ ls -all /usr/lib/libmagic.so.1*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    17 2008-12-01 03:52 /usr/lib/libmagic.so.1 -> libmagic.so.1.0.0
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 84664 2008-09-09 00:05 /usr/lib/libmagic.so.1.0.0
$ ldd /usr/lib/libmagic.so.1.0.0 
    linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xb7f85000)
    libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1 (0xb7f51000)
    libc.so.6 => /lib/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 (0xb7df6000)
    /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7f86000)
$ sudo ldconfig -v | grep "libmagic"
    libmagic.so.1 -> libmagic.so.1.0.0

Any idea how I should be moving along with this? Is there something completely wrong here?

Answer 1

your problem here is that your linker is looking for libmagic.so but you have the file called libmagic.so.1

Just try and create a symlink to to libmagic.so.1 to libmagic.so

It should solve your problem