Frequently Asked Questions

I get "undefined reference to..." for functions like "sin()"

In order to access the mathematical functions that are declared in <math.h>, the linker needs to be told to also link the mathematical library, libm.a.

Typically, system libraries like libm.a are given to the final C compiler command line that performs the linking step by adding a flag -lm at the end. (That is, the initial lib and the filename suffix from the library are written immediately after a -l flag. So for a libfoo.a library, -lfoo needs to be provided.) This will make the linker search the library in a path known to the system.

An alternative would be to specify the full path to the libm.a file at the same place on the command line, i. e. after all the object files (*.o). However, since this requires knowledge of where the build system will exactly find those library files, this is deprecated for system libraries.