gfortran can't find library that IS there

Question

I'm having trouble linking my program to a library. I've never done this before so I'm probably doing something stupid, but as far as I can tell I'm doing the right thing. I need to link my program foo.f90 to a library libbar.a which is in a directory elsewhere below my home directory. I enter the command:

gfortran -c foo.f90
gfortran -o foo foo.f90 -L/directory/of/library -llibbar.a

But this throws:

ld: library not found for -llibhealpix.a

Where of course libhealpix.a is the real library (rather than libbar.a)

Any ideas as to why this would occur?

Solution

Try -lbar (or perhaps -lhealpix, if that's the real library name).

-lxyz results in a search for a file named libxyz.a. Consequently, if you specify -llibbar.a then the file needs to be named liblibbar.a.a.

You could also simply specify the path and full name of the archive file on the gfortran command line: gfortran -o foo foo.f90 /directory/of/library/libbar.a