[MPlayer-users] Why is MPlayer shown as "shared library"?

[Reimar Döffinger]

On 09.10.2013, at 11:16, Roberto Ragusa <mail at robertoragusa.it> wrote:
> On 10/09/2013 09:18 AM, Marcin 'Rambo' Roguski wrote:
>>> But MPlayer shows as "shared library", which seems weird.
>> 
>> As your distro's MIME magic file supplier.
>> 
>> Here's mine
>> /usr/bin/mplayer: ELF 32-bit LSB executable
> 
> Artifact of -fPIC? -fPIE?

Yes. PIE is not used on 32 bit, since the tools do not (yet) support non-PIC PIE, and the performance cost of PIC is too large on 32 bit.
It is negligible on 64 bit x86 though, so PIC/PIE is enabled for better security (address randomization).
This makes it look quite similar to a shared library, confusing simple tools like "file" (and admittedly there is no fool-proof way to know (you can run any .so file from the command line, most will just crash, some like the libc will actually run and print some information though).