Viewing Linux Library / Executable version info

Question

In Windows, EXE and DLL have version info, including at least the following fields:

1. file version
2. product version
3. internal name
4. product name
5. copyright

In Linux Library / Executable:

• Which fields are present?
• How to view such info?
• What tools/libraries to read?

Solution 1

The version info in not explicitly stored in an ELF file. What you have in there is the name of the library, the soname, which includes the major version. The full version is usually stored as a part of the library file name.

If you have library, say libtest.so, then you usually have:

• libtest.so.1.0.1 - The library file itself, containing the full version
• libtest.so.1 - Symlink to libtest.so.1.0.1, having the same name as soname
• libtest.so - Symlink to libtest.so.1 used for linking.

In the library file libtest.so.1.0.1, there will be an entry called SONAME in dynamic section, that will say this library is called libtest.so.1. When you link a program against this library, the linked program will store the soname of the library under NEEDED entry in the dynamic section.

If you want to verify, what exactly is in which ELF file, you can try to run:

readelf -a -W elffile

where elffile can be either an library of an executable.

If you simply want to get the library version, you can play with:

readelf -d  /path/to/library.so |grep SONAME

AFAIK, there's no such info (at least not by default) in executable files.

Or you can rely on the program itself or your packaging system, as Rahul Patil wrote.

Solution 2

You can use ldconfig -v | grep libraryname , also command has option command -V or binaryfile --version

example :

test@ubuntukrb12:~# ls --version
ls (GNU coreutils) 8.13
Copyright (C) 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

also you can use yum or aptitude based on distro you are using eg.

in RHEL5/CENTOS5/Fedora you can use yum info packagename or if it installed then use rpm --version packagename

 [root@ldap1 ~]# yum info bind97
    Loaded plugins: downloadonly, fastestmirror, security
    Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
     * base: mirrors.sin3.sg.voxel.net
     * epel: mirror.imt-systems.com
     * extras: mirrors.sin3.sg.voxel.net
     * updates: mirrors.sin3.sg.voxel.net
    Installed Packages
    Name       : bind97
    Arch       : i386
    Epoch      : 32
    Version    : 9.7.0
    Release    : 10.P2.el5_8.4
    Size       : 6.3 M
    Repo       : installed
    Summary    : The Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) DNS (Domain Name System) server
    URL        : http://www.isc.org/products/BIND/
    License    : ISC
    Description: BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) is an implementation of the DNS
               : (Domain Name System) protocols. BIND includes a DNS server (named),
               : which resolves host names to IP addresses; a resolver library
               : (routines for applications to use when interfacing with DNS); and
               : tools for verifying that the DNS server is operating properly.

In Ubuntu You can use aptitude show pkgname or dpkg --version pkgname

root@ubuntukrb12:~# aptitude show bind9utils
Package: bind9utils
State: installed
Automatically installed: yes
Version: 1:9.8.1.dfsg.P1-4ubuntu0.4
Priority: optional
Section: net
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <[email protected]>
Architecture: amd64
Uncompressed Size: 306 k
Depends: libbind9-80, libc6 (>= 2.14), libdns81, libisc83, libisccc80, libisccfg82
Conflicts: bind9utils
Replaces: bind9 (<= 1:9.5.0~b2-1), bind9 (<= 1:9.5.0~b2-1)
Description: Utilities for BIND
 This package provides various utilities that are useful for maintaining a working BIND installation.

Solution 3

Run this to get version information - strings libssl.so.1.0.0 | grep "1\.0"

SSLv3 part of OpenSSL 1.0.2p-fips  14 Aug 2018
OpenSSL 1.0.2p-fips  14 Aug 2018
TLSv1 part of OpenSSL 1.0.2p-fips  14 Aug 2018
DTLSv1 part of OpenSSL 1.0.2p-fips  14 Aug 2018

Solution 4

For Redhat based systems do this:

ldd [file you want to run] | > needed-packages

Check out needed-packages file, make sure there are no path names in the library file names. If so remove them, so "/bin/lib/libx.so.1" change to "libx.so.1"

Find out what package contains the library

yum -y provides [lib name]

Or put this into a script or run from cmd line:

for lib in `cat libs.txt`;
do
   yum -y provides $lib | head -2 | grep " : " >> packages.list
done

Next, create the following script or run from cmd line:

for package in `cat packages.list | awk '{ print $1 }'`;
do
    yum -y install $package
done

You're done, run your program. If you get GUI errors when running. Copy them down and if they are library references, find the packages for those and install the same way.

View more solutions

Comments

[Rahul Patil]

nice info, it's new to me never used readelf, if you don't mind , may i ask you where & why use readelf

[v154c1]

Readelf (and similar tools) is useful, when you want to look inside an elf file :). I use it mostly when programming to look up symbols in libraries (when something doesn't work), or when there's some problem with a library. (man readelf)

[houazy]

For rpm, I think you'll want rpm --query pkgname to list the version string (rpm --version will print the version of rpm itself; the same might be true for dpkg)

[Hkoof]

All the package-system based solutions do not necessarily give definitive version information. This can make a difference when it comes to shared libs installed by custom packages (as in my case) or locally compiled libs. This simple -albeit a bit crude- solution delivers, where even a tool such as readelf failed for me. I only feel a bit embarrased I found this post before thinking of this solution myself :-). Thanks!

[JohnRDOrazio]

this is what I needed, because I needed to check a library that was not installed by the package manager but rather linked by a specific program. This gave me the information I needed.

[mattdm]

This only happens to work because this library has that text as bare strings. It isn't a general solution.