[jggimi]

Ah, missed that he'd suggested it.

And I asked, because that has nothing to do with symlinks, and everything to do with run time libraries. And running that command, that way, will remove all local shared libraries from lookup. It will make almost every executable in /usr/local/bin unusable.

If you read the man page (link provided in my prior post), you will see that it says:

It scans a set of built-in system directories
and any directories specified on the command line (in the given order)
looking for shared libraries and stores the results...

Those built-in directories do not include any of your 3rd party libraries, or X libraries. Look at where ldconfig is run by /etc/rc:

if [ -f /sbin/ldconfig ]; then
    echo 'creating runtime link editor directory cache.'
    if [ -d /usr/local/lib ]; then
        shlib_dirs="/usr/local/lib $shlib_dirs"
    fi
    if [ -d /usr/X11R6/lib ]; then
        shlib_dirs="/usr/X11R6/lib $shlib_dirs"
    fi
    ldconfig $shlib_dirs
fi

I'm not blaming Shep for this, as mistakes are easy to make. But please, take this as a warning. You should NEVER blindly type what someone gives you. Ever. You should understand what you are doing before doing it.