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Raven
Asked: 2012-03-24 13:28:28 +0800 CST

How to find location of installed library

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Background: I'm trying to build my program but first I need to set up libraries in NetBeans. My project is using GLU and therefore I installed libglu-dev. I didn't note the location where the libraries were located and now I can't find them.

I've switched to Linux just a few days ago and so far I'm very content with it, however I couldn't google this one out and became frustrated. Is there way to find out where files of package were installed without running the installation again? I mean if I got library xxx and installed it some time ago, is there some-command xxx that will print this info?

I've already tried locate, find and whereis commands, but either I'm missing something or I just can't do it correctly. For libglu, locate returns:

/usr/share/bug/libglu1-mesa
/usr/share/bug/libglu1-mesa/control
/usr/share/bug/libglu1-mesa/script
/usr/share/doc/libglu1-mesa
/usr/share/doc/libglu1-mesa/changelog.Debian.gz
/usr/share/doc/libglu1-mesa/copyright
/usr/share/lintian/overrides/libglu1-mesa
/var/lib/dpkg/info/libglu1-mesa:i386.list
/var/lib/dpkg/info/libglu1-mesa:i386.md5sums
/var/lib/dpkg/info/libglu1-mesa:i386.postinst
/var/lib/dpkg/info/libglu1-mesa:i386.postrm
/var/lib/dpkg/info/libglu1-mesa:i386.shlibs

The other two commands fail to find anything. Now locate did its job, but I'm sure none of those paths is where the library actually resides (at least everything I was linking so far was in /usr/lib or /usr/local/lib).

libglu was introduced just as example. I'm looking for a general solution for this problem.

libraries find locate

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Easy! dpkg -L packagename. That will list all files (with location) that were brought in by the package.

    • 103

  2. In case if you are not sure about package name you could list all packages and try to find requested:

    dpkg --get-selections | grep -v deinstall | grep <packagename>

    For example:

    $ dpkg --get-selections | grep -v deinstall | grep zip

    Output:

    bzip2 install
gzipinstall
p7zip-fullinstall
unzipinstall                                                                       
zipinstall

    And then:

    $ dpkg -L zip

    Output:

    /.  
/usr
/usr/share
/usr/share/doc
/usr/share/doc/zip
/usr/share/doc/zip/copyright
/usr/share/doc/zip/TODO
/usr/share/doc/zip/changelog.Debian.gz
/usr/share/doc/zip/WHATSNEW
/usr/share/man
/usr/share/man/man1
/usr/share/man/man1/zipsplit.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/zipcloak.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/zip.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/zipnote.1.gz
/usr/bin
/usr/bin/zipsplit
/usr/bin/zipcloak
/usr/bin/zip
/usr/bin/
/usr/share/doc/zip/changelog.gz
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