Let me understand. You call putenv() inside a program that relies on LD_LIBRARY_PATH?

You do know that dld() opens the runtime libraries BEFORE your putenv() code is called?
How else could it access the external code for putenv? putenv is linked as a symbol reference that has to be dereferenced at runtime.

So. Part of exectuable image activation is opening the runtime libraries. Do you have truss or strace or trace on your machine? If so, run your code under it. Note that before the executable runs the stuff you wrote it does a lot of file mapping and file opening. Most of that is shared libraries.

One way -

Instead of all this pain, statically link your exectuable against the library that now requiresLD_LIBRARY_PATH. Usually this means supplying the name of the .a form of the library on the command line (or makefile)

Code:

cc myfile.c /some/odd/path/liboddlibrary.a  -o myfile

Now, you do not need LD_LIBRARY_PATH in order to use liboddlibrary