I’ve just found out what some strange linking options mean with gcc! Quite often i’ve seen at the linking stage gcc object.o -o executable.out -lsomelibrary -Wl,-rpath,somepath I’ve discovered that the -Wl,-rpath,somepath expands basically to -Wl -rpath=somepath and this means the location of the shared library in somepath is hard coded into the executable to be used at runtime. rpath means runtime path, all of which means the dangerous LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable is not needed.