Using

To date, libiberty is generally not installed on its own. It has evolved over years but does not have its own version number nor release schedule.

Possibly the easiest way to use libiberty in your projects is to drop the libiberty code into your project’s sources, and to build the library along with your own sources; the library would then be linked in at the end. This prevents any possible version mismatches with other copies of libiberty elsewhere on the system.

Passing --enable-install-libiberty to the configure script when building libiberty causes the header files and archive library to be installed when make install is run. This option also takes an (optional) argument to specify the installation location, in the same manner as --prefix.

For your own projects, an approach which offers stability and flexibility is to include libiberty with your code, but allow the end user to optionally choose to use a previously-installed version instead. In this way the user may choose (for example) to install libiberty as part of GCC, and use that version for all software built with that compiler. (This approach has proven useful with software using the GNU readline library.)

Making use of libiberty code usually requires that you include one or more header files from the libiberty distribution. (They will be named as necessary in the function descriptions.) At link time, you will need to add -liberty to your link command invocation.