Hi folks, hope you can excuse my ignorance. I am studying some LPI material here and working through the ldconfig utility. I would appreciate if someone could clear up something on this subject.

When I run the ldconfig -p command I get a whole list of share libraries.

However, the directory ld.so.conf.d stores the following sub directories which are empty both.

/lib/i486-linux-gnu
/usr/lib/i486-linux-gnu


Can anyone tell me why they would be empty considering they are supposed to store information about shared libraries. Or am I missing something in my brain?

Are you thinking that there should be something specific in those directories?

I've checked, and they are present but empty on my PC as well (running Ubuntu). All the libraries output by ldconfig -p are in /lib or /usr/lib. I'd suggest that they are probably there for "legacy" reasons - just in case some package wants to install shared libraries there.

Edited to add: Just checked in Beginning Linux Programming (4th ed.), which says:
It makes no mention that I can see of these other locations.

Yes, Robhogg seems to be right.
My Fedora 10 64bits does not have those folders at all. Looks like it is there (in the ld.so.config) for libraries for some (obscure, optional, extra) program we haven't installed yet.