How do you find what version of libstdc++ library is installed on your linux machine?

I found the following command: strings /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6 | grep GLIBC from here. It seems to work but this is an ad-hoc/heuristic method.

Is there a specific command that can be used to query the library version of C++? Or is the method I found the accepted method?

To find which library is being used you could run

 $ /sbin/ldconfig -p | grep stdc++
	libstdc++.so.6 (libc6) => /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6

The list of compatible versions for libstdc++ version 3.4.0 and above is provided by

 $ strings /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6 | grep LIBCXX
 GLIBCXX_3.4
 GLIBCXX_3.4.1
 GLIBCXX_3.4.2
 ...

For earlier versions the symbol GLIBCPP is defined.

The date stamp of the library is defined in a macro __GLIBCXX__ or __GLIBCPP__ depending on the version:

// libdatestamp.cxx
#include <cstdio>

int main(int argc, char* argv[]){
#ifdef __GLIBCPP__
    std::printf("GLIBCPP: %d\n",__GLIBCPP__);
#endif
#ifdef __GLIBCXX__
    std::printf("GLIBCXX: %d\n",__GLIBCXX__);
#endif
   return 0;
}

$ g++ libdatestamp.cxx -o libdatestamp
$ ./libdatestamp
GLIBCXX: 20101208

The table of datestamps of libstdc++ versions is listed in the documentation:

What exactly do you want to know?

The shared library soname? That's part of the filename, libstdc++.so.6, or shown by readelf -d /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6 | grep soname.

The minor revision number? You should be able to get that by simply checking what the symlink points to:

$ ls -l  /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 19 Mar 23 09:43 /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6 -> libstdc++.so.6.0.16

That tells you it's 6.0.16, which is the 16th revision of the libstdc++.so.6 version, which corresponds to the GLIBCXX_3.4.16 symbol versions.

Or do you mean the release it comes from? It's part of GCC so it's the same version as GCC, so unless you've screwed up your system by installing unmatched versions of g++ and libstdc++.so you can get that from:

$ g++ -dumpversion
4.6.3

Or, on most distros, you can just ask the package manager. On my Fedora host that's

$ rpm -q libstdc++
libstdc++-4.6.3-2.fc16.x86_64
libstdc++-4.6.3-2.fc16.i686

As other answers have said, you can map releases to library versions by checking the ABI docs

The mechanism I tend to use is a combination of readelf -V to dump the .gnu.version information from libstdc++, and then a lookup table that matches the largest GLIBCXX_ value extracted.

readelf -sV /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6 | sed -n 's/.*@@GLIBCXX_//p' | sort -u -V | tail -1

if your version of sort is too old to have the -V option (which sorts by version number) then you can use:

tr '.' ' ' | sort -nu -t ' ' -k 1 -k 2 -k 3 -k 4 | tr ' ' '.'

instead of the sort -u -V, to sort by up to 4 version digits.

In general, matching the ABI version should be good enough.

If you're trying to track down the libstdc++.so.<VERSION>, though, you can use a little bash like:

file=/usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6
while [ -h $file ]; do file=$(ls -l $file | sed -n 's/.*-> //p'); done
echo ${file#*.so.}

so for my system this yielded 6.0.10.

If, however, you're trying to get a binary that was compiled on systemX to work on systemY, then these sorts of things will only get you so far. In those cases, carrying along a copy of the libstdc++.so that was used for the application, and then having a run script that does an:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=<directory of stashed libstdc++.so>
exec application.bin "$@"

generally works around the issue of the .so that is on the box being incompatible with the version from the application. For more extreme differences in environment, I tend to just add all the dependent libraries until the application works properly. This is the linux equivalent of working around what, for windows, would be considered dll hell.

You could use g++ --version in combination with the GCC ABI docs to find out.