zlib compression libraries

From www.zlib.net

Despite the source code not having been updated since July 2005, I recently discovered some RHEL3 servers were running embarrasingly outdated shared libraries.

Fortunately, any recent distro should contain the current release, 1.2.3.

You can easily check the installed verison (of the shared libraries at least) with something like the following. Look for 1.2.3 in the output.

ls /usr/lib/libz*

If you want/need to install from source, make sure to compile both the static and shared libraries. The configure script default is to only build the static library.

From the source zlib-1.2.3 directory:

./configure –prefix=/usr

make

make install

then

./configure –prefix=/usr –shared

make

make install