Hello Everyone,

I need to be able to get the latest version of a library (lmylib.so.Major.Minor) using AWK or something.

The reason I need this because I have a script that will create a new library with a new version number depending in the last version I have of mylib.

I tried this "awk '{ print $9}' a.out" where a.out is ls -la /usr/local/lib but How do I get to the minor number from there?

Thanks in advance,
Alaa G

What distro are you using?

major/minor refers to device files not libraries. I don't see the library you mention on my system so am not sure why you're expecting to see major/minor numbers.

Also remember compiled files are not pure text and awk is a text processor. You may have better results by typing:

strings filename |awk '{print $}'

The "strings" command prints the only the text within a binary to the output.

I'm using fedora 5.

I don't mean the major and minor number of the device. I meant it for the libraries. If you go to /usr/local/lib or usr/lib and for example looked at "libpcap.so.0.8.3", the 8 means the major version and the 3 means minor version.

"a.out" is not an executable, I just called this way; it has the output of the command "ls -la /usr/local/lib"

so What I wanted to is to get all the links with mylib.so* and find the latest minor version so when I update my library I could increment automatically from the script.

Thanks

OK got you now.

Looking in /usr/lib on my AS3 system I'll use libz.so.1.1.4 for example.

To see all the files that are related to libz.so.1.1.4
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root root 13 Aug 3 2005 libz.so -> libz.so.1.1.4
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root root 13 Aug 3 2005 libz.so.1 -> libz.so.1.1.4
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 52584 Sep 17 2003 libz.so.1.1.4

To get just the ones that are links you do it with:
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root root 13 Aug 3 2005 libz.so -> libz.so.1.1.4
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root root 13 Aug 3 2005 libz.so.1 -> libz.so.1.1.4
In the above the grep for ^l (ell) tells it to look for an l in the first position as only a symbolic link would have that.

To get the name of the file that was linked do this:
libz.so
libz.so.1

The "cut -c57-" says to get everything from position 57 to end of line. This would be the file name and the file to which it is linked along with the "->". The reason to do cut rather than awk is that it will be position 57 regardless of whether the date on the file is a full date or just a time stamp but the number of fields in a file (as seen by awk) would vary if it were a date rather than a time stamp. (Note this position is consistent within an operating system but can be different from one OS to the next so you should always count to be sure of the number.) Once the cut is done you do awk to get only the first part of the output from the cut which is the file name. Here the opposite is true - the position varies but the field count doesn't so this is why awk is appropriate here.

Thank you so much for your help. I ended up using this command

"ls -l libz.so.1.1.4 | awk '{print $9}' | sort |awk -F. '{print $5}' | tail --lines=1 | awk '{print $1 + 1}' " --> this will give you the new version number of the library. I used this command from the make file, but you have to use $$9 instead because $ is a keyword in Makefiles