how to check the version of a program?

[penguinopolipitese]

hi,

I'm trying to install a program called pango on FC4, which wants Glib 2.10 or above.
So I installed Glib 2.12.2. Or so I thought...

However in the config.log I see it says I'm running Glib 2.6.6. So I assume this is a default with FC4.

I remember I had a similar problem with GCC, where I needed to change the new installation version to the default. Only thing was I can't remember how this is accomplished. Are there general commands to check which version of a program you are using and to change the default version?... sorry if it's a dumb question.

[techieMoe]

Some programs will give you their version information if you type programname --version in a terminal. Java and GCC are like this.

[Zelmo]

Looking in my /usr/lib directory, it looks like all of the glib libraries have their version appended to the name. If I do this

$ ls -l /usr/lib | grep libglib

I can see that certain ones are links to certain other ones, so I can be certain which ones will be used in case their versions differ.

[penguinopolipitese]

thanks techiemoe.... that was it... "gcc -v" for the version.... doesn't work on glib though...

I found from another round of googling that I could get the new version properly installed by using
./configure –prefix=/usr

over a straight ./configure

so I'm happy. Thanks for your insights.