ldconfig error: is not a symbolic link

Question

When running:

    sudo /sbin/ldconfig

the following error appears:

    /sbin/ldconfig: /usr/local/lib/ is not a symbolic li         


        

Answer 1

I ran into this issue with the Oracle 11R2 client. Not sure if the Oracle installer did this or someone did it here before i arrived. It was not 64-bit vs 32-bit, all was 64-bit.

The error was that libexpat.so.1 was not a symbolic link.

It turned out that there were two identical files, libexpat.so.1.5.2 and libexpat.so.1. Removing the offending file and making it a symlink to the 1.5.2 version caused the error to go away.

Makes sense that you'd want the well-known name to be a symlink to the current version. If you do this, it's less likely that you'll end up with a stale library.