Question: We use ldd to find dependencies on Linux platform. Unfortunately, ldd doesn't work on Mac OS X. Which command line tool is equivalent to ldd on Mac OS X?

Answer: For Mac OS X, we can use 'otool' in place of ldd for finding dependencies.

Command: otool -L <file-path>

Example:
Here is an example for finding dependencies for pdf2swf.

akash$ otool -L /usr/local/bin/pdf2swf
/usr/local/bin/pdf2swf:
/opt/local/lib/libmp3lame.0.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.0.0)
/opt/local/lib/libgif.4.dylib (compatibility version 6.0.0, current version 6.6.0)
/opt/local/lib/libjpeg.8.dylib (compatibility version 9.0.0, current version 9.2.0)
/opt/local/lib/libz.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.2.5)
/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 123.0.0)
/opt/local/lib/libfontconfig.1.dylib (compatibility version 6.0.0, current version 6.4.0)
/opt/local/lib/libfreetype.6.dylib (compatibility version 13.0.0, current version 13.0.0)
/usr/lib/libstdc++.6.dylib (compatibility version 7.0.0, current version 7.9.0)

We can also dump all the load commands using "otool -l <file-path>".
(On Linux, we can dump the entire contents of the dynamic section with readelf -d <file-path>.)

For more options, see man page for otool.


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