linker woes - undefined reference

Question

I\'m having a problem with my compiler telling me there is an \'undefined reference to\' a function I want to use in a library. Let me share some info on the problem:

Answer 1

Headers provide function declarations and function definitions. To allow the linker find the function's implementation (and get rid of the undefined reference) you need to ask the compiler driver (gcc) to link the specific library where the function resides using the -l flag. For instance, -lm will link the math library. A function's manual page typically specifies what library, if any, must be specified to find the function.

If the linker can't find a specified library you can add a library search path using the -L switch (for example, -L/usr/local/lib). You can also permanently affect the library path through the LIBRARY_PATH environment variable.

Here are some additional details to help you debug your problem. By convention the names of library files are prefixed with lib and (in their static form) have a .a extension. Thus, the statically linked version of the system's default math library (the one you link with -lm) typically resides in /usr/lib/libm.a. To see what symbols a given library defines you can run nm --defined-only on the library file. On my system, running the command on libm.a gives me output like the following.

e_atan2.o:
00000000 T atan2

e_asinf.o:
00000000 T asinf

e_asin.o:
00000000 T asin

To see the library path that your compiler uses and which libraries it loads by default you can invoke gcc with the -v option. Again on my system this gives the following output.

GNU assembler version 2.15 [FreeBSD] 2004-05-23 (i386-obrien-freebsd) 
using BFD version 2.15 [FreeBSD] 2004-05-23
/usr/bin/ld -V -dynamic-linker /libexec/ld-elf.so.1 /usr/lib/crt1.o 
/usr/lib/crti.o /usr/lib/crtbegin.o -L/usr/lib /var/tmp//ccIxJczl.o -lgcc -lc 
-lgcc /usr/lib/crtend.o /usr/lib/crtn.o