I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 and the binary I'm trying to run needs glibc2.16, I tried updating glibc by using apt-get install libc6 but only glibc2.15 got installed , can someone suggest me how to get glibc 2.16 in my machine.
Sorry if this question doesn't belong here, but I couldn't find any resource.
You need to upgrade to a newer Ubuntu version, or recompile the software which currently needs glibc 2.16 specifically for Ubuntu 12.04, so that it will work with that older glibc version. Upgrading glibc has far-reaching consequences. I don't think there is any distribution which creates stable releases and which upgrades glibc within a stable release. For one thing, glibc tries hard to preserve backwards compatibility at the binary level, but less so at the source level, and a glibc upgrade could break downstream build processes.
The command sudo apt-get install glibc6 would itself install the latest version of glibc, compatible for your distro.
And as "Florian Weimer" suggested, force upgrading glibc wouldn't be a great idea.
You could build and install desired version of GLIBC from source into alternate location, and make the single application use it, as described in this answer.
Or you could prepare a suitable chroot jail, and run the application from it.
Or you could run the application inside of a virtual machine, such as Oracle VirtualBox.
