If you want to have binaries and libraries portable across linux systems, or even portable across locations on your filesystem, you need to know a bit about dynamic linking.

First read man ld.so, this will tell you about where libraries are looked up when they are being searched for during application startup. This should also tell you something about why using RPATH is a bad idea (it's because it overrides all else with a fixed location - useless).

Next you will want to see what is currently in the RUNPATH of an elf thing (I might call this RPATH in future, with the understanding that I mean alias RPATH=RUNPATH). There are atleast two ways of achieving this with standard tools. They are

objdump -p <binary>

and

readelf -d <binary>

It's usually a good idea to pipe the output through

egrep 'R(UN)?PATH'

which catches the legacy case of RPATH usage as well.

Finally, you are likely to want to modify it (I know I frequently am). Again, there are two tools that can do the job: chrpath and patchelf. They are very similar and can also quickly print the content of RUNPATH. Below are their usage strings. chrpath:

Usage: chrpath [-v|-d|-c|-r <path>] <program> [<program> ...]

   -v|--version                Display program version number
   -d|--delete                 Delete current rpath/runpath setting
   -c|--convert                Convert rpath to runpath
   -r <path>|--replace <path>  Replace current rpath/runpath setting
                               with the path given
   -l|--list                   List the current rpath/runpath (default)
   -k|--keepgoing              Continue as much as possible after an error.
   -h|--help                   Show this usage information.

patchelf:

syntax: patchelf
  [--set-interpreter FILENAME]
  [--print-interpreter]
  [--set-rpath RPATH]
  [--shrink-rpath]
  [--print-rpath]
  [--force-rpath]
  [--remove-needed LIBRARY]
  [--debug]
  [--version]
  FILENAME

patchelf was developed by the nixos people, who depend on it to make their whole idea of a package manager work.