Soname

In Unix and Unix-like operating systems, a soname is a field of data in a shared object file. The soname is a string, which is used as a "logical name" describing the functionality of the object. Typically, that name is equal to the filename of the library, or to a prefix thereof, e.g. libc.so.6.
The soname is often used to provide version backwards-compatibility information. For instance, if versions 1.0 through 1.9 of the shared library "libx" provide identical interfaces, they... meer