Shared objects

Hello,

I don't understand the purpose of dlopen() and friends.

$ cat mini.c
int main(void) { return 0; }
$ gcc -O2 mini.c
$ ldd a.out
linux-gate.so.1 => (0xffffe000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/libc.so.6 (0xb7df7000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7f41000)

If all my executables use libc.so instead of libc.a, I will get all
the benefits of dynamic linking.

Where would I use dlopen() instead of just providing the name of
the library when I build my executable?

In short, when / where do people use dlopen?
.

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