Very strange linker behavior

Question

This is strange because I was able to get the error below to go away by removing the reference to libm.

gcc -o example example.o -Wl -L/home/kensey/cdev/lib          


        

Answer 1

Hard to tell. Because there are custom library directories in the command line it's conceivable that -lm links an incompatible alternative version. Without -lm the linker could pull in another version of it because it's needed by one of the libraries you link.

To make sure strace both invocations and see where libm.so is coming from in both cases.

BTW, -Wl switch seems to do nothing and -L/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu is mentioned twice.