Vous pouvez consulter les informations détaillées sur "libc" et "glibc" dans les pages de manuel de votre système Linux en tapant "man libc" dans l'interpréteur de commandes, copié comme ci-dessous ;
LIBC(7) Linux Programmer's Manual LIBC(7)
NAME
libc - overview of standard C libraries on Linux
DESCRIPTION
The term "libc" is commonly used as a shorthand for the "standard C library", a library of standard functions that can be
used by all C programs (and sometimes by programs in other languages). Because of some history (see below), use of the
term "libc" to refer to the standard C library is somewhat ambiguous on Linux.
glibc
By far the most widely used C library on Linux is the GNU C Library http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/, often referred
to as glibc. This is the C library that is nowadays used in all major Linux distributions. It is also the C library
whose details are documented in the relevant pages of the man-pages project (primarily in Section 3 of the manual). Doc
umentation of glibc is also available in the glibc manual, available via the command info libc. Release 1.0 of glibc was
made in September 1992. (There were earlier 0.x releases.) The next major release of glibc was 2.0, at the beginning of
1997.
The pathname /lib/libc.so.6 (or something similar) is normally a symbolic link that points to the location of the glibc
library, and executing this pathname will cause glibc to display various information about the version installed on your
system.
Linux libc
In the early to mid 1990s, there was for a while Linux libc, a fork of glibc 1.x created by Linux developers who felt
that glibc development at the time was not sufficing for the needs of Linux. Often, this library was referred to
(ambiguously) as just "libc". Linux libc released major versions 2, 3, 4, and 5 (as well as many minor versions of those
releases). For a while, Linux libc was the standard C library in many Linux distributions.
However, notwithstanding the original motivations of the Linux libc effort, by the time glibc 2.0 was released (in 1997),
it was clearly superior to Linux libc, and all major Linux distributions that had been using Linux libc soon switched
back to glibc. Since this switch occurred long ago, man-pages no longer takes care to document Linux libc details. Nev
ertheless, the history is visible in vestiges of information about Linux libc that remain in some manual pages, in par
ticular, references to libc4 and libc5.