Make can't find curses.h

Gaussia picture Gaussia · Feb 5, 2016 · Viewed 12.9k times · Source

I have this program called samtools (version 1.3) that is used for manipulating the files that you get from DNA sequencing experiments.

The downloaded program is contained in a folder. To set the program up I enter that folder in the terminal (on an ubuntu computer). I enter the commando "make".

it runs an prints what it does but terminates with the error message:

bam_tview_curses.o bam_tview_curses.c
bam_tview_curses.c:41:20: fatal error: curses.h: No such file or directory
 #include <curses.h>
                    ^
compilation terminated.
make: *** [bam_tview_curses.o] Error 1

My initial response (after searching the Internet) was that curses was not installed, and I tried to remedy that using sudo (apparently my user was not in the list of sudoers though.

So I tried to see if curses was already installed, after consulting the Internet I tried

ldconfig -p | grep ncurses

which gave the output:

libncursesw.so.5 (libc6,x86-64) => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libncursesw.so.5
libncurses.so.5 (libc6,x86-64) => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libncurses.so.5

I took this as curses was installed. But that leaves me at a loss what could have happened. But this should at least mean that curses are there right? I'm not very experianced using ubuntu or C programs (I took a smaller course in C long ago and whil I've used linux computers quite some I've mostly used the terminal for navigation)

Happy for Help!

Answer

sameer pradhan picture sameer pradhan · Jul 16, 2020

only

sudo apt-get install libncurses-dev

worked for me.