Ignore him. Adding cruft to your filesystem when you could simply fix the makefile is a silly suggestion. Hi Sridhar!! :-P -brian On 4/11/2012 9:13 AM, hvlems at zonnet.nl wrote: Sridhar, you are a jolly fellow aren't you ? Now I thought I understood the way linux uses libraries and yet you add another mystery Is it because you want to keep me in a perpetual mystified state of mind? Hans :-) -----Original Message----- From: Sridhar Ayengar<ploopster at gmail.com> Sender: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2012 08:52:15 To:<hecnet at Update.UU.SE> Reply-To: hecnet at Update.UU.SECc: Dave McGuire<mcguire at neurotica.com> Subject: Re: [HECnet] building simh Dave McGuire wrote: Is it possible to explain what the magic does? More precisely: what is the difference between an .a and an .so library? I detailed this a few posts ago. .a is a static library, .so is a shared library. How on earth does -lpcap point to /usr/lib? -lpcap tells the linker to look in every directory in the library search path to find either libpcap.a or libpcap.so. This library lives in /usr/lib on most systems, but the simh makefile hard-coding that path (and hard-coding it to only find the static library) is a big mistake. It is, but why not just symlink it for the time being? Peace... Sridhar