I am currently working on a script to roll out PHP with about 15 php modules supported. I am wanting to automate this as much as possible. I am going to be doing this on a large number of servers, some already in production and have been in production for years. The older servers may have old libraries installed and newer servers will have updated libraries. I am wanting to be able to check the library versions to make sure it meets the php requirements. If the module libraries are too old then recompile with the newest version. If the server has the newest library version then to skip compiling the software and continue checking the dependencies for the next php module.

My question, Is there an easy way to check the library versions on a server. An example of this would be, the bz2 module for php. This module requires bzip2/libbzip2 version >= 1.0.x. Is there a way to easily check the current version of the libraries installed? Another example would be GD. I am wanting to make sure the latest version of GD is installed, skip the compile if it is already installed.

Any suggestion on how to easily check this, would be greatly appreciated.

i am not sure you are qualified to do your job. just do an 'ls' with the ip address of all your machines in /usr/lib/bzip, for example and check it is the right version (libzz.so.?.?