Using (GNU libiberty)

## 1 Using ¶

To date, `libiberty` is generally not installed on its own. It has evolved over years but does not have its own version number nor release schedule.

Possibly the easiest way to use `libiberty` in your projects is to drop the `libiberty` code into your project’s sources, and to build the library along with your own sources; the library would then be linked in at the end. This prevents any possible version mismatches with other copies of libiberty elsewhere on the system.

Passing `--enable-install-libiberty` to the `configure` script when building `libiberty` causes the header files and archive library to be installed when `make install` is run. This option also takes an (optional) argument to specify the installation location, in the same manner as `--prefix`.

For your own projects, an approach which offers stability and flexibility is to include `libiberty` with your code, but allow the end user to optionally choose to use a previously-installed version instead. In this way the user may choose (for example) to install `libiberty` as part of GCC, and use that version for all software built with that compiler. (This approach has proven useful with software using the GNU `readline` library.)

Making use of `libiberty` code usually requires that you include one or more header files from the `libiberty` distribution. (They will be named as necessary in the function descriptions.) At link time, you will need to add `-liberty` to your link command invocation.