sqlplus or sqlplus64 tools are used to connect and manage Oracle Databases. sqlplus64 is 64 bit version of the sqlplus. After installating these tools successfully when we try to run sqlplus command we may get an shared object file or library error.

sqlplus Shared Library Error

sqlplus command shared library error full definition is like below. Keep in mind that for 64 bit version it will be sqlplus64

sqlplus: error while loading shared libraries: libsqlplus.so: cannot 
open shared object file: No such file or directory

Print LD_LIBRARY_PATH

We can understand that shared library libsqlplus.so can not be found in the defined library path. Library path is stored in bash environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH . So first we will check this environment variable.

$ echo $LD_LIBRARY_PATH

We can see that there is no path in  LD_LIBRARY_PATH. So there will be no library to load.

Add Oracle Library To The  LD_LIBRARY_PATH

In order to load sqlplus library we will add libsqlplus.so path to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH. By default libsqlplus.so will stored in /usr/lib/oracle/18.3/client64/lib/ where version 18.3 will be set according to your version. We will use export command to add this path to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/lib/oracle/18.3/client64/lib/"

$ echo $LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Find libsqlplus.so Library Path

If we can not find libsqlplus.so in the default paths we may need to search for. We can use locate command in order to find the path of the libsqlplus.so.

First we will update the file database with the updatedb command.

$ sudo updatedb

And then we will search for the library.

$ locate libsqlplus.so

Run sqlplus Without Problem

Now everything seems OK. We can run sqlplus command without problem like below.

$ sqlplus64