C Compiler Error from Standard Headers - Undefined C++ Definitions

C Compiler error from standard headers - undefined C++ definitions

I found the problem:

These constants were supposed to be defined in sys/cdefs.h.

For some reason this file was in /usr/include/bsd/sys/cdefs.h.

The bsd version of cdefs.h did not have these constants defined.

I removed the bsd directory and reinstalled libc6-dev.

Everything appears to be working now.

C header issue: #include and undefined reference

gcc main.c hello_world.c -o main

Also, always use header guards:

#ifndef HELLO_WORLD_H
#define HELLO_WORLD_H

/* header file contents go here */

#endif /* HELLO_WORLD_H */

Undefined symbols error when using a header file

You need to link wtf with your main. Easiest way to compile it together - gcc will link 'em for you, like this:

gcc main.c wtf.c -o main

Longer way (separate compilation of wtf):

gcc -c wtf.c
gcc main.c wtf.o -o main

Even longer (separate compilation and linking)

gcc -c wtf.c
gcc -c main.c
gcc main.o wtf.o -o main

Instead of last gcc call you can run ld directly with the same effect.

What is an undefined reference/unresolved external symbol error and how do I fix it?

Compiling a C++ program takes place in several steps, as specified by 2.2 (credits to Keith Thompson for the reference):

The precedence among the syntax rules of translation is specified by the following phases [see footnote].

1. Physical source file characters are mapped, in an implementation-defined manner, to the basic source character set
   (introducing new-line characters for end-of-line indicators) if
   necessary. [SNIP]
2. Each instance of a backslash character (\) immediately followed by a new-line character is deleted, splicing physical source lines to
   form logical source lines. [SNIP]
3. The source file is decomposed into preprocessing tokens (2.5) and sequences of white-space characters (including comments). [SNIP]
4. Preprocessing directives are executed, macro invocations are expanded, and _Pragma unary operator expressions are executed. [SNIP]
5. Each source character set member in a character literal or a string literal, as well as each escape sequence and universal-character-name
   in a character literal or a non-raw string literal, is converted to
   the corresponding member of the execution character set; [SNIP]
6. Adjacent string literal tokens are concatenated.
7. White-space characters separating tokens are no longer significant. Each preprocessing token is converted into a token. (2.7). The
   resulting tokens are syntactically and semantically analyzed and
   translated as a translation unit. [SNIP]
8. Translated translation units and instantiation units are combined as follows: [SNIP]
9. All external entity references are resolved. Library components are linked to satisfy external references to entities not defined in the
   current translation. All such translator output is collected into a
   program image which contains information needed for execution in its
   execution environment. (emphasis mine)

[footnote] Implementations must behave as if these separate phases occur, although in practice different phases might be folded together.

The specified errors occur during this last stage of compilation, most commonly referred to as linking. It basically means that you compiled a bunch of implementation files into object files or libraries and now you want to get them to work together.

Say you defined symbol a in a.cpp. Now, b.cpp declared that symbol and used it. Before linking, it simply assumes that that symbol was defined somewhere, but it doesn't yet care where. The linking phase is responsible for finding the symbol and correctly linking it to b.cpp (well, actually to the object or library that uses it).

If you're using Microsoft Visual Studio, you'll see that projects generate .lib files. These contain a table of exported symbols, and a table of imported symbols. The imported symbols are resolved against the libraries you link against, and the exported symbols are provided for the libraries that use that .lib (if any).

Similar mechanisms exist for other compilers/ platforms.

Common error messages are error LNK2001, error LNK1120, error LNK2019 for Microsoft Visual Studio and undefined reference to symbolName for GCC.

The code:

struct X
{
   virtual void foo();
};
struct Y : X
{
   void foo() {}
};
struct A
{
   virtual ~A() = 0;
};
struct B: A
{
   virtual ~B(){}
};
extern int x;
void foo();
int main()
{
   x = 0;
   foo();
   Y y;
   B b;
}

will generate the following errors with GCC:

/home/AbiSfw/ccvvuHoX.o: In function `main':
prog.cpp:(.text+0x10): undefined reference to `x'
prog.cpp:(.text+0x19): undefined reference to `foo()'
prog.cpp:(.text+0x2d): undefined reference to `A::~A()'
/home/AbiSfw/ccvvuHoX.o: In function `B::~B()':
prog.cpp:(.text._ZN1BD1Ev[B::~B()]+0xb): undefined reference to `A::~A()'
/home/AbiSfw/ccvvuHoX.o: In function `B::~B()':
prog.cpp:(.text._ZN1BD0Ev[B::~B()]+0x12): undefined reference to `A::~A()'
/home/AbiSfw/ccvvuHoX.o:(.rodata._ZTI1Y[typeinfo for Y]+0x8): undefined reference to `typeinfo for X'
/home/AbiSfw/ccvvuHoX.o:(.rodata._ZTI1B[typeinfo for B]+0x8): undefined reference to `typeinfo for A'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

and similar errors with Microsoft Visual Studio:

1>test2.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "void __cdecl foo(void)" (?foo@@YAXXZ)
1>test2.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "int x" (?x@@3HA)
1>test2.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "public: virtual __thiscall A::~A(void)" (??1A@@UAE@XZ)
1>test2.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "public: virtual void __thiscall X::foo(void)" (?foo@X@@UAEXXZ)
1>...\test2.exe : fatal error LNK1120: 4 unresolved externals

Common causes include:

• Failure to link against appropriate libraries/object files or compile implementation files
• Declared and undefined variable or function.
• Common issues with class-type members
• Template implementations not visible.
• Symbols were defined in a C program and used in C++ code.
• Incorrectly importing/exporting methods/classes across modules/dll. (MSVS specific)
• Circular library dependency
• undefined reference to `WinMain@16'
• Interdependent library order
• Multiple source files of the same name
• Mistyping or not including the .lib extension when using the #pragma (Microsoft Visual Studio)
• Problems with template friends
• Inconsistent UNICODE definitions
• Missing "extern" in const variable declarations/definitions (C++ only)
• Visual Studio Code not configured for a multiple file project

Why does CC not see my function definition in header?

You need to compile both your source files together:

cc main.c foo.c -o main

Also, in this case, -o produces an executable, so calling it main.o can be misleading.

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Yet another tidbit, though unrelated to the question: the #ifndef and #define in foo.h don't match.

undefined reference to c header file's

First of all, the error message comes from linker, it does not find symbol getcpuusage.

The reason for this is, your info.cpp is C++ source file, while main.c is C source file. By default (to allow for example function overloading) C++ does so called name-mangling to all C++ functions, basically combining function name with its parameter types to create symbol name (which looks mangled and messy to a human). The file names of your source files matter, because cmake determines how to compile the file from that, so in this case it compiles one with C compiler and other with C++ compiler.

There are 3 direct solutions:

1. Use only C++, in other words rename main.c to main.cpp. It would be good to use C++ headers and library in that case, so don't use for example stdio.h either, prefer C++ libraries.

2. Use only C, in other words rename info.cpp to info.c (and remove any C++ code from it, but in this case it doesn't have any).

3. Tell C++ compiler to not do name mangling. This can be done using extern "c" when declaring the function (and then you must not use overloads):

info.h:

#ifndef INFO_H
#define INFO_H

#ifdef __cplusplus
// when included in C++ file, let compiler know these are C functions
extern "C" {
#endif

int sshConnection();
char* getcpuusage();

#ifdef __cplusplus
}
#endif

#endif // INFO_H

C error: undefined reference to function, but it IS defined

How are you doing the compiling and linking? You'll need to specify both files, something like:

gcc testpoint.c point.c

...so that it knows to link the functions from both together. With the code as it's written right now, however, you'll then run into the opposite problem: multiple definitions of main. You'll need/want to eliminate one (undoubtedly the one in point.c).

In a larger program, you typically compile and link separately to avoid re-compiling anything that hasn't changed. You normally specify what needs to be done via a makefile, and use make to do the work. In this case you'd have something like this:

OBJS=testpoint.o point.o

testpoint.exe: $(OBJS)
    gcc $(OJBS)

The first is just a macro for the names of the object files. You get it expanded with $(OBJS). The second is a rule to tell make 1) that the executable depends on the object files, and 2) telling it how to create the executable when/if it's out of date compared to an object file.

Most versions of make (including the one in MinGW I'm pretty sure) have a built-in "implicit rule" to tell them how to create an object file from a C source file. It normally looks roughly like this:

.c.o:
    $(CC) -c $(CFLAGS) $<

This assumes the name of the C compiler is in a macro named CC (implicitly defined like CC=gcc) and allows you to specify any flags you care about in a macro named CFLAGS (e.g., CFLAGS=-O3 to turn on optimization) and $< is a special macro that expands to the name of the source file.

You typically store this in a file named Makefile, and to build your program, you just type make at the command line. It implicitly looks for a file named Makefile, and runs whatever rules it contains.

The good point of this is that make automatically looks at the timestamps on the files, so it will only re-compile the files that have changed since the last time you compiled them (i.e., files where the ".c" file has a more recent time-stamp than the matching ".o" file).

Also note that 1) there are lots of variations in how to use make when it comes to large projects, and 2) there are also lots of alternatives to make. I've only hit on the bare minimum of high points here.

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