Get more info about an IP address or domain name, such as organization, abuse contacts and geolocation.
One of a set of tools we are providing to everyone as a way of saying thank you for being a part of the community.
Lets assume we are building a product under windows that interfaces to one ore more mail services, like MAPI, VIM or SMTP.
Lets also assume that you do this depending on user's choice. Normally, these service APIs are in seperate DLLs (MAPI32.DLL or WINSOCK.DLL, etc).
If you code does explicit LoadLibrary, and then GetProcAddress to get function pointer and call the fucniton via the pointer. In this case, when the product is installed on a users' machine, it will interface with only the mail interface that machine provides. For example, if the user does not have MAPI32.DLL or VIM.DLL, but has only WINSOCK, you program will still work fine.
On the other hand, if you have "implicitly linked" the DLLs than, the product will not run, if any of these DLLs are not found. (Lets' say, VIM.DLL is not available).
The same will hold good for HP-UX. Replace "shl_load" for 'LoadLibray' and 'shl_findsym' for 'GetProcAddress'.
But the dynamic/shared libraries (or the linker) on most UNIX have few additional feature than on the Windows. For example, you can use -B option of HP-UX linker to specify run-time binding behavior of a program using shared libraries. For more info man "ld".