I often find myself curious as to what libraries and frameworks a program relies upon. Thanks to a recent entry by Marc Liyanage, I’ve managed to make this task rather automatic, lifting most of his little command verbatim.

Note that this is a ZSH style alias, but should be trivial to make work with the shell of your choice:

libdepends () { echo Dependencies for: $* otool -L $* | cut -f 1 -d ‘ ‘ | grep -v ‘:’ | xargs -n 1 ls }

When called, you’ll get something similar to the following:

%libdepends =mutt Dependencies for: /usr/local/bin/mutt /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib /usr/lib/libssl.0.9.7.dylib /usr/lib/libcrypto.0.9.7.dylib %

Pretty useful, huh? The way it’s written, you’ll get an error (from ls, of course) if any of the shared libraries do not exist. Thanks for this tip, Marc!