FreeBSD /lib/libc.so.7: version FBSD_1.4 not found

All I'm trying to do is run a simple find command using ack

$ ack stuff

and get the following message

/lib/libc.so.7: version FBSD_1.4 required by /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.24/mach/CORE/libperl.so.5.24 not found

Any ideas what is causing this, nothing on the system has been changed?

1 Answer

It looks like the perl5 package requires a newer version of the C library than the one your system is using. This is extremely unlikely to happen if

• Your system is up to date (no pending package updates)
• You're only using official FreeBSD package repositories, no third-party ones
• You don't have any custom third-party software installers on your system that might've chucked a copy of perl into /usr/lib/perl5
• You installed perl5 and ack-grep through the official ports reopository

How did you install ack-grep and perl? If you didn't install perl5 or ack-grep from the FreeBSD package repositories (ports), that's probably your issue.

You could try recompiling perl5 from source code against your operating system. The ./configure script and the linker would figure out how to use your existing C library in /lib to link cleanly against it without errors (assuming the compile succeeded). Or try uninstalling or reinstalling perl5.

Also test a few other programs on your system and make sure they're not all experiencing the same problem! If it's a system wide issue with all non-builtin commands (like vi, bash, zsh, nano, pkg, etc.) -- if it's happening with many or most programs, your C library may have been overwritten or corrupted on-disk (either by a virus, by accident, or software/hardware bug/failure). If that's the case, you may have to copy a working libc from another FreeBSD system onto this system (out of band) to fix the damage, because a broken libc will really hamstring your ability to do anything useful with the computer in the way of repairs.