Linux Journal: Modifying a Dynamic Library Without Changing the Source Code

“Sometimes, you might want to determine what is happening in a
shared library without modifying the library (have you tried to
build glibc lately?). Other times, you might want to override only
a few functions within a library and get them to do something
else–force a process to a specific CPU, prevent a specific USB
message from being sent and so on. All of these tasks are possible
if you use the LD_PRELOAD environment variable and a small shim
program placed between the application and the library.

“As an example, say you create a shared library object called
shim.so and want it to be loaded before any other shared library.
Say you also want to run the program ‘test…'”

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