This document is a Mac OS X manual page. Manual pages are a command-line technology for providing documentation. You can view these manual pages locally using the man(1) command. These manual pages come from many different sources, and thus, have a variety of writing styles.

For more information about the manual page format, see the manual page for manpages(5).

DLCLOSE(3)               BSD Library Functions Manual               DLCLOSE(3)

NAME
     dlclose -- close a dynamic library or bundle

SYNOPSIS
     #include <dlfcn.h>

     int
     dlclose(void* handle);

DESCRIPTION
     dlclose() releases a reference to the dynamic library or bundle referenced by handle.  If the reference
     count drops to 0, the bundle is removed from the address space, and handle is rendered invalid.  Just
     before removing a dynamic library or bundle in this way, any termination routines in it are called.
     handle is the value returned by a previous call to dlopen.

     Prior to Mac OS X 10.5, only bundles could be unloaded.  Starting in Mac OS X 10.5, dynamic libraries
     may also be unloaded.  There are a couple of cases in which a dynamic library will never be unloaded:
     1) the main executable links against it, 2) An API that does not supoort unloading (e.g. NSAddImage())
     was used to load it or some other dynnamic library that depends on it, 3) the dynamic library is in
     dyld's shared cache.

RETURN VALUES
     If dlclose() is successful, it returns a value of 0.  Otherwise it returns -1, and sets an error string
     that can be retrived with dlerror().

SEE ALSO
     dlopen(3) dlsym(3) dlerror(3) dyld(3) ld(1) cc(1)

                                  Nov 6, 2006