Static link of shared library function in gcc

Refer to:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/forcing-static-linking-of-shared-libraries-696714/

You need the static version of the library to link it.

A shared library is actually an executable in a special formatwith entry points specified (and some sticky addressing issuesincluded). It does not have all the information needed tolink statically.

You can't statically link a shared library (or dynamically link a static one).

The flag -static will force the linker to use static libraries (.a) instead of shared (.so) ones. But static libraries aren't always installed by default, so you may have to install the static library yourself.

Another possible approach is to use statifier or Ermine. Both tools take as input a dynamically linked executable and as output create a self-contained executable with all shared libraries embedded.

If you want to link, say, libapplejuice statically, but not, say, liborangejuice, you can link like this:

gcc object1.o object2.o -Wl,-Bstatic -lapplejuice -Wl,-Bdynamic -lorangejuice -o binary

There's a caveat -- if liborangejuice uses libapplejuice, then libapplejuice will be dynamically linked too.

You'll have to link liborangejuice statically alongside with libapplejuice to get libapplejuice static.

And don't forget to keep -Wl,-Bdynamic else you'll end up linking everything static, including libc (which isn't a good thing to do).

Yeah, I know this is an 8 year-old question, but I was told that it was possible to statically link against a shared-object library and this was literally the top hit when I searched for more information about it.

To actually demonstrate that statically linking a shared-object library is not possible with ld (gcc's linker) -- as opposed to just a bunch of people insisting that it's not possible -- use the following gcc command:

gcc -o executablename objectname.o -Wl,-Bstatic -l:libnamespec.so

(Of course you'll have to compile objectname.o from sourcename.c, and you should probably make up your own shared-object library as well. If you do, use -Wl,--library-path,. so that ld can find your library in the local directory.)

The actual error you receive is:

/usr/bin/ld: attempted static link of dynamic object `libnamespec.so'collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status

Hope that helps.