How to find the include path of a globally installed C library
In order to include a globally installed library via -L it helps to know how to find its include path, and this post
shows how to find it quickly.
Note: These steps have been tested on a Mac, but should work exactly the same way on Linux.
- list all libraries to ensure that it is installed:
pkg-config --list-all - find the path of the library you want to include:
pkg-config --libs <libname>
Sample Session
Here is how you'd find the include string for libedit.
➝ pkg-config --list-all
liblzma liblzma - General purpose data compression library
libpcrecpp libpcrecpp - PCRECPP - C++ wrapper for PCRE
openssl OpenSSL - Secure Sockets Layer and cryptography libraries and tools
apr-1 APR - The Apache Portable Runtime library
apr-util-1 APR Utils - Companion library for APR
libcrypto OpenSSL-libcrypto - OpenSSL cryptography library
libpcre libpcre - PCRE - Perl compatible regular expressions C library with 8 bit character support
libedit libedit - command line editor library provides generic line editing, history, and tokenization functions.
libpcreposix libpcreposix - PCREPosix - Posix compatible interface to libpcre
libiodbc iODBC - iODBC Driver Manager
libssl OpenSSL - Secure Sockets Layer and cryptography libraries
➝ pkg-config --libs libedit
-L/usr/local/lib -ledit -lcurses