$ORIGIN (or equivalently ${ORIGIN}) This expands to the directory containing the program or shared object. Thus, an application located in somedir/app could be compiled with

gcc -Wl,-rpath,'$ORIGIN/../lib'

so that it finds an associated shared object in somedir/lib no matter where somedir is located in the directory hierarchy. This facilitates the creation of "turn-key" applications that do not need to be installed into special directories, but can instead be unpacked into any directory and still find their own shared objects.

https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/ld.so.8.html via https://fzakaria.com/2026/06/21/nix-needs-relocatable-binaries