I was helping a friend with a little C-program recently. C is not my language of choice, and when I was tinkering years ago, I was using a Windows compiler and not gcc. Things are a little different in the Ubuntu compilation world. I was receiving an unexpected error message even though I had proper headers.
testing.c:(.text+0×156): undefined reference to `pow’
testing.c:(.text+0×174): undefined reference to `pow’
testing.c:(.text+0x18e): undefined reference to `pow’
#include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <math.h> #include <time.h>
My code was modestly simple. The variables were previously defined and perfectly in order.
double left = a * pow(b, 3);
double right = pow(c, 2) - pow(d, e);
Apparently, in order to make gcc load the proper library, you need to explicitly tell it to in the call to compilation. gcc -lm testing.c -o math && ./testing
Notice the -lm flag? That tells gcc to load a specific library, and in this case, the math library.