When troubleshooting linking a library or object file, it’s useful to search the symbols defined in the file. The nm program lists the symbols in library and object files. Search for a symbol (e.g. function) by piping nm output to grep. For this example the ncurses library is used.

For an object or static library:

nm /usr/lib/libncurses.a | grep myfunc

For a shared library, the particular version suffix might be needed:

nm -D /usr/lib/libncurses.so.6 | grep myfunc

When the line starts with “T”, the symbol is defined in the library. When the line starts with “U”, the symbol is undefined in the library. Note that header defines, such as used in PDCurses are not listed by nm. That is, PDCurses curses.h is not detected by nm.

#define getch() wgetch(stdscr)

For Fortran, since the “.h” files are not used, the developer needs to provide an interface mapping the functions in Fortran. Note that the developer must use symbol detection code in the build system (e.g. CMake) to ensure the symbol is only defined once. This is important for a library like Curses that has multiple independent implementation. Specifically, the Ncurses library defines “getch” in the .c source, but PDCurses defines “getch” in the .h header.

The Blocktran project shows how to handle this situation with getch() macro.