Interesting and Important Libraries

Table 9-2 lists some significant libraries included with Mac OS X, while Table 9-3 lists some significant libraries that do not come with Mac OS X (but are available through Fink).

Table 9-2. Important Mac OS X libraries

Library

Description

Headers

libalias

A packet aliasing library for masquerading and network address translation

Not included in Mac OS X; see the network_cmds module in the Darwin CVS archive

libl.a

The lex runtime library

Not applicable; lexical analyzers that you generate with lex have all the necessary definitions

libMallocDebug

A library for the MallocDebug utility (/Developer/ Applications)

Not applicable; you don’t need to do anything special with your code to use this utility

libncurses (libcurses is available for backward compatibility)

The new curses screen library, a set of functions for controlling a terminal’s display screen

/usr/include/ncurses.h (curses.h is available for backward compatibility)

libobjc

The library for the GNU Objective-C compiler

/usr/include/objc/*

libpcap

Packet capture library

/usr/include/pcap*

libssl and libcrypto

An open source toolkit implementing Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Versions 2 and 3, Transport Layer Security (TLS) Version 1, and a full-strength, general-purpose cryptography library

/usr/include/openssl/*

libtcl

The Tcl runtime library

/usr/include/tcl.h

liby.a

The yacc runtime library

Not applicable; parsers that you generate with yacc ...

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