fast-shlibdeps

A fast ELF shared library dependency analyzer for Debian-based systems. This tool analyzes ELF binaries to determine their shared library dependencies and maps them to Debian packages, providing output suitable for generating package dependencies.

This all happens in-process, allowing you to scan a massive directory tree without any subprocess overhead.

This tool was built to speed up my cursed Debian package building project, where I'm looking to build some packages without exactly adhering to Policy.

Installation

cargo install --locked fast-shlibdeps

Usage

# Analyze a single binary
fast-shlibdeps /usr/bin/ls

# Analyze multiple binaries
fast-shlibdeps /usr/bin/ls /usr/bin/cat

# Analyze all binaries in a directory recursively
fast-shlibdeps /usr/local/bin/

Output

The tool outputs a comma-separated list of package dependencies with minimum version requirements:

libc6 (>=2.39-0ubuntu8.3), libssl3t64 (>=3.0.13-0ubuntu3.4), zlib1g (>=1:1.3.dfsg+really1.3.1-1ubuntu0.1)

Performance

fast-shlibdeps is optimized for speed:

• Direct ELF parsing instead of using ldd or objdump
• Direct dpkg database reading instead of subprocess calls to dpkg-query
• Efficient batch processing of multiple files

License

This project is licensed under the CC0 License - see the LICENSE.md file for details.

AI Disclaimer

This tool was built with the help of Claude Code. This README was significantly written by Claude. I wanted to get this quickly built, so I took a shortcut.