@steely_glint got curious and dug around a bit, found a file from 2012 when I apparently had last fiddled around with LD_PRELOAD 😅

In any case, according to https://stackoverflow.com/a/924181, you'd need the .a files from which the .so are generated, otherwise very hard-to-impossible?

(NB: very old answer, so something _might_ have changed in the meantime, but given that binutils is generally _very_ stable, I'd be rather surprised)

@steely_glint You can create a new dummy shared library that's dynamically linked against all the other dependencies, so you only need to explicitly preload one thing.

@hyc That's an interesting idea. Thanks.

@floe As you have guessed I don't have the source or the .a files .

I'm also limited to what I can persuade the java library loader to do. - Hence the LD_PRELOAD .

The cause seems to be an oem making media plugins with C++ and the C API library depending on them in a way I don't rightly understand. I can't blame Java because the C sample program only links if you use g++ .