LIBC(7) | Linux Programmer's Manual | LIBC(7) |
The pathname /lib/libc.so.6 (or something similar) is normally a symbolic link that points to the location of the glibc library, and executing this pathname will cause glibc to display various information about the version installed on your system.
However, notwithstanding the original motivations of the Linux libc effort, by the time glibc 2.0 was released (in 1997), it was clearly superior to Linux libc, and all major Linux distributions that had been using Linux libc soon switched back to glibc. To avoid any confusion with Linux libc versions, glibc 2.0 and later used the shared library soname libc.so.6.
Since the switch from Linux libc to glibc 2.0 occurred long ago, man-pages no longer takes care to document Linux libc details. Nevertheless, the history is visible in vestiges of information about Linux libc that remain in a few manual pages, in particular, references to libc4 and libc5.
2016-12-12 | Linux |