Pkg-config

pkg-config is a simple package management tool used to display compiler and linker flags for a given library. Previous methods at doing this either involve hard-coding these values, or using a (libname)-config tool that outputted the compiler/linker flags for the library (libname), both of which have problems that pkg-config fixes.

For a library to be registered with pkg-config, it has to create a .pc file and install it. Installation directories are stored in the environment variables, but it's usually somewhere in the libdir.

= Example = The following command shows a list of all registered libraries. $ pkg-config --list-all xf86rushproto         XF86RushProto - XF86Rush extension headers fontsproto            FontsProto - Fonts extension headers com_err               com_err - Common error description library ...

= More information = For more information see the man page for pkg-config, which is quite thorough in documenting all aspects of using pkg-config.