My program uses plugins, that are loaded dynamically with dlopen(). The locations of these plugins can be arbitrary, so they aren't necessarily in the library path. In some cases, one plugin needs to depend on another plugin. So if A and B are dynamic libraries, I'll first load A, then load B which uses symbols defined in A. My reading of the dlopen() documentation implies that if I specify RTLD_GLOBAL this should all work. But it doesn't. When I call dlopen() on the second library, it fails with an error saying it couldn't find the first one (which had already been loaded with dlopen()): Error loading library /usr/local/openmm/lib/plugins/libOpenMMRPMDOpenCL.dylib: dlopen(/usr/local/openmm/lib/plugins/libOpenMMRPMDOpenCL.dylib, 9): Library not loaded: libOpenMMOpenCL.dylib Referenced from: /usr/local/openmm/lib/plugins/libOpenMMRPMDOpenCL.dylib Reason: image not found How can I make this work?