cuda-gdb error with libtinfo.so.5

Originally Published on bevs.xyz

I had a fresh install of cuda-tools from the Manjaro software repository and I simply couldn’t run cuda-gdb. I was getting the following error

cuda-gdb: error while loading shared libraries: libtinfo.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

A related error was as follows:

cuda-gdb: error while loading shared libraries: libncursesw.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I had to investigate the files libtinfo.so.5 and libncursesw.so.5. It was a simple version-conflict with ncurses. My distro had ncurses 6.2, whereas cuda-gdb was insisting on ncurses 5. A simple symlink was in order, actually two. The following two lines saved my day!

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libncursesw.so.6.2  /usr/lib/libtinfo.so.5

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libncursesw.so.6.2  /usr/lib/libncursesw.so.5

I got the necessary pointers from this stackoverflow answer for an unrelated Android Studio question.