shared library locations for matlab mex files:

Question

I am trying to write a matlab mex function which uses libhdf5; My Linux install provides libhdf5-1.8 shared libraries and headers. However, my version of Matlab, r2007b, pro

Answer 1

I am accepting Ramashalanka's answer because it led me to the exact solution which I will post here for completeness only:

1. download the hdf5-1.6.5 library from the hdf5 website, and install the header files in a local directory;
2. tell mex to look for "hdf5.h" in this local directory, rather than in the standard location (e.g. /usr/include.)
3. tell mex to compile my code and the shared object library provided by matlab, and do not use the -ldfh5 flag in LDFLAGS.

the command I used is, essentially:

/opt/matlab/matlab_default/bin/mex -v CC#gcc CXX#g++ CFLAGS#"-Wall -O3 -fPIC -I./hdf5_1.6.5/src -I/usr/include -I/opt/matlab/matlab_default/extern/include" CXXFLAGS#"-Wall -O3 -fPIC -I./hdf5_1.6.5/src -I/usr/include -I/opt/matlab/matlab_default/extern/include " -O -lmwblas -largeArrayDims -L/usr/lib64 hdf5_read_strings.c /opt/matlab/matlab_default/bin/glnxa64/libhdf5.so.0

this gets translated by mex into the commands:

gcc -c -I/opt/matlab/matlab75/extern/include -DMATLAB_MEX_FILE -Wall -O3 -fPIC -I./hdf5_1.6.5/src -I/usr/include -I/opt/matlab/matlab_default/extern/include -O -DNDEBUG hdf5_read_strings.c
gcc -c -I/opt/matlab/matlab75/extern/include -DMATLAB_MEX_FILE -Wall -O3 -fPIC -I./hdf5_1.6.5/src -I/usr/include -I/opt/matlab/matlab_default/extern/include -O -DNDEBUG /opt/matlab/matlab75/extern/src/mexversion.c
gcc -O -pthread -shared -Wl,--version-script,/opt/matlab/matlab75/extern/lib/glnxa64/mexFunction.map -Wl,--no-undefined -o hdf5_read_strings.mexa64  hdf5_read_strings.o mexversion.o  -lmwblas -L/usr/lib64 /opt/matlab/matlab_default/bin/glnxa64/libhdf5.so.0 -Wl,-rpath-link,/opt/matlab/matlab_default/bin/glnxa64 -L/opt/matlab/matlab_default/bin/glnxa64 -lmx -lmex -lmat -lm -lstdc++

this solution should work on all my various target machines and at least until I upgrade to matlab r2009a, which I believe uses hdf5-1.8. thanks for all the help, sorry for being so dense with this--I think I was overly-committed to using the packaged version of hdf5, rather than a local set of header files.

Note this would all have been trivial if Mathworks had provided a set of the header files with the Matlab distribution...