Hi, on SGI IRIX systems there is a toolset called "ELF Quickstart".
It includes many smaller tools, but essantially it boils down to this: a) a "database" (undocumented textfile) is maintained for shared libs and information about the memory range they occupy b) every time packages are installed (via inst or swmgr) the installer runs "rqsall" at the end c) rqsall reads the database in and pre relocates the binaries against the libs it depends on d) if there are conflicts, the dynamic runtime linker has to do the relocation for this conflict (lib) only I have a lot of manual pages about that and try to push SGI to donate this to the Linux community. ;-) -- Peter W"achtler Phone: +49-511-563 549-31 LOEWE Opta GmbH Fax: +49-511-563 549-65 Hildesheimer Str. 140 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] D-30173 Hannover Web: http://www.loewe.de