curl: (2) Failed Initialization

Question

I have installed libcurl 7.33.0 on Linux. I used the following commands to install:

./configure  
make  
make install

If I run curl h

Answer 1

At a wild guess, you've linked the /usr/local/bin/curl binary to the system curl library.

To verify that this is the case, you should do:

ldd /usr/local/bin/curl

If it indicates a line like:

libcurl.so.4 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcurl.so.4 (0x00007fea7e889000)

It means that the curl binary is picking up the system curl library. While it was linked at compile time to the correct library, at run-time it's picking up the incorrect library, which seems to be a pretty typical reason for this error happening.

If you run the configure with --disable-shared, then it will produce a .a, which, when linked to the curl binary will not depend on the system libcurl.so, but will instead have it's own private code.

If you're cross-compiling, then you'll also need to cross-compile all the dependent libraries, and that is another question.

Answer 2

Ubuntu does include curl by default as far as I know. So if you don't need specifically the 7.33.0 version, then purge it and install it again from the repository.

#remove everything you had with curl
sudo apt-get purge curl
#optional update
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
#install it from repository
sudo apt-get install curl