Brian Hechinger wrote: Ignore him. Adding cruft to your filesystem when you could simply fix the makefile is a silly suggestion. Maintaining a site-specific patch to the Makefile temporarily until the project Makefile is changed is more work than just leaving the symlink in place until the project Makefile is changed. Peace... Sridhar 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