pldd(1)

💖 pldd — display dynamic shared objects linked into a process 💖

okay bestie, gather round, because this little tool pldd is from the General Commands Manual and it is genuinely such a useful vibe. It's a command, it lives in section 1, and it does exactly one thing but it does it beautifully. Let's get into it 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

pldd — display dynamic shared objects linked into a process

like... that's the whole job. it shows you the DSOs chillin' inside a process. iconic.

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

pldd pid

pldd option

that's it. no notes. two ways to call it, that's the whole menu 💅

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So the tea is: pldd prints out a list of the dynamic shared objects (DSOs, yes that's the acronym, we love an acronym) that are linked into the process you point at with a specific process ID (PID).

And listen — this list is thorough. It doesn't just show you the stuff linked at startup, oh no. It also includes the libraries that have been dynamically loaded using dlopen(3) ✨. So the sneaky runtime-loaded ones? Yeah, they're in there too. You get the full picture, no gatekeeping.

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👑 OPTIONS 👑

• --help, -? — shows you a help message and then dips. bye 👋
• --usage — shows a short usage message and exits. like help but lowkey on a diet.
• --version, -V — shows the program version info and exits. so you know exactly what you're working with 💜

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💀 EXIT STATUS 💀

pay attention bestie, this part matters:

• 0 — success, we ate, no crumbs
• 1 — the process you named doesn't exist, OR you don't have permission to access its dynamic shared object list, OR you supplied no command-line arguments at all. any of those three and it's a 1, straight up.
• 64 — you gave it an invalid option. that's a 64. oops 🙈

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⭐ VERSIONS ⭐

some other systems have a similar command. so if you're hopping between platforms, mind the vibe check, it's not identical everywhere.

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🌈 STANDARDS 🌈

None. that's the whole section. nothing. zero. we're unstandardized and unbothered 🤷‍♀️

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💜 HISTORY 💜

glibc 2.15. that's where it was born. mark the calendar 🎀

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🧚 NOTES 🧚

ok so there's more than one way to get this info, and the manpage wants you to know:

the command

lsof -p PID

also shows output that includes the dynamic shared objects that are linked into a process. (not exactly the same output, but you can see the DSOs in there 👀)

And also — gdb(1) has an info shared command that shows the shared libraries being used by a process. So you can get output similar to pldd using a command like the following one, which monitors the process with the specified pid:

$ gdb -ex "set confirm off" \
      -ex "set height 0" \
      -ex "info shared" \
      -ex "quit" \
      -p $pid \
| grep '^0x.*0x';

like, that's a whole pipeline, but it works 💅

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😭 BUGS 😭

no because this is genuinely tragic: from glibc 2.19 to glibc 2.29, pldd was broken — it just hung when you executed it. nothing happened. forever. the audacity 💀

It got fixed in glibc 2.30, and the fix has been backported to earlier glibc versions in some distributions. so depending on your distro you might already be saved. prayers up 🫶

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🔥 EXAMPLES 🔥

here's the iconic demo, live:

$ echo $$;               # Display PID of shell
1143
$ pldd $$;               # Display DSOs linked into the shell
1143:   /usr/bin/bash
linux-vdso.so.1
/lib64/libtinfo.so.5
/lib64/libdl.so.2
/lib64/libc.so.6
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
/lib64/libnss_files.so.2

see how $$ gives you the shell's own PID and then you just hand that straight to pldd? chef's kiss. the DSOs just come tumbling out ✨

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🍓 SEE ALSO 🍓

• ldd(1)
• lsof(1)
• dlopen(3)
• ld.so(8)

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and that's the whole page bestie!! 🎀 This particular copy of pldd(1) comes from Linux man-pages 6.20, dated 2026-02-08 — so if you're reading this version, that's who to thank. now go inspect some processes, you're literally the main character of debugging 💅💖