How does gcc/ld find zlib.so?

I've used zlib for ages and never thought about the fact that it is named slightly unconventionally. While most libraries on Linux follow the naming convention of lib<name>.so for shared objects and lib<name>.a for archives, zlib is named zlib.so/zlib.a. My question is: how does gcc/ld know to look for zlib.so when I use -lz as a link flag?

I understand that for linking, gcc invokes ld, which searches for libraries in certain default paths and any path specified with -L, and it appends the lib and .so or .a. parts as necessary. Oddly, gcc's manual page for linking options only mentions that the linker can find archives; there is no mention of the .so extension. The man page for ld at least mentions both extensions, but still only mentions searching by prepending lib to the specified library name. How does ld know to add the lib after the z for zlib? I've never seen this happen to another library.

gcc has several different methods for linking libraries, shared or static. If you specify -lz, gcc is going to look for libz.so (possibly with some version bits between the libz and the .so, but the important part is the file name will start with libz and end with .so), or for libz.a (again, possibly with version info) if you are compiling statically, or as a fallback if the shared library does not exist. If you specify -lzlib it will look for libzlib.so (which is not the standard name - the package is often named zlib, but the library itself is libz). Another way of linking would be to not use the -l<lib> option, and just specify /path/to/zlib.so or -L /path/to zlib.so (or zlib.a if you want). In this case, the library doesn't have to have the lib prefix, but you would have to explicitly provide any version info, unless provisions are made for a symbolic link or something similar to provide the literal name zlib.so.

Applications can also load shared libraries at runtime via dlopen() and it's other associated functions, in which case the library can also be named whatever you want it to be (this doesn't work for static libraries, of course).

So, if the library you are looking at is actually called zlib.so, then it is not being found by gcc ... -lz, unless it just happens to be a symbolic link to libz.so (or vice versa, in which case gcc is really just using libz.so, which happens to have the same content as your zlib.so). However gcc might be using it if the build process explicitly names the library in the link stage (not using -l<lib>) or if your application loads it via dlopen() (but in that case, it's not really linked to your program - it's just loaded at run time).