From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_function_interface
the ctypes module can load C functions from shared libraries/DLLs on-the-fly and translate simple data types automatically between Python and C semantics as follows:
import ctypes libc = ctypes.CDLL( '/lib/libc.so.6' ) # under Linux/Unix t = libc.time(None) # equivalent C code: t = time(NULL) print t
On Lubuntu 18.04
$ whereis libc
libc: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.a /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so /usr/share/man/man7/libc.7.gz
$ locate libc.so
/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc.so.6
/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so
$ ls -l /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 298 Apr 16 16:14 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so
I was wondering why loading the libc shared library has "'LibraryLoader' object is not callable" error?
$ python3 --version
Python 3.6.5
$ python3
>>> import ctypes
>>> libc=ctypes.cdll("/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so")
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'LibraryLoader' object is not callable
>>> libc=ctypes.cdll("/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6")
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'LibraryLoader' object is not callable
>>> libc=ctypes.cdll("/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc.so.6")
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'LibraryLoader' object is not callable
See also https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/449107/what-differences-and-relations-are-between-the-various-libc-so