Error: error while loading shared libraries: libncursesw.so.6

[johann-petrak]

On Ubuntu 20.04, after installation (from 3.0.0 tarball or github master) I get the error message:

htop: error while loading shared libraries: libncursesw.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

[rien333]

Well, do you have ncurses installed somewhere? I'm not sure which ubuntu package provides libncursesw.so specifically, but that package is what you need to get htop working. That readme does say that ncurces is required, btw.

[vielmetti]

On Debian Buster, I did apt-get install libncurses-dev to provide the needed dependency.

[rien333]

I did apt-get install libncurses-dev to provide the needed dependency.

Yeah, that's a somewhat confusing part of the docs. It says ncurses is needed, but debian-based distro's often bundle various (development) libs separately from the main package.

[johann-petrak]

sudo apt-get install libncurses-dev tells me:

Note, selecting 'libncurses5-dev' instead of 'libncurses-dev'
libncurses5-dev is already the newest version (6.1-1ubuntu1.18.04)

All available packages with a prefix libncursesw are called libncursesw5*.

Since I did ./configure and compile the software I would have thought that thiese kinds of things are being dealt with in the configure step?

[GHPS]

Since I did ./configure and compile the software I would have thought that thiese kinds of things are being dealt with in the configure step?

I had the same issue - compiling htop version 3.0.5-dev, also on Ubuntu 18.04, also with libncursesw5* installed:

./htop: error while loading shared libraries: libncursesw.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

The solution is to disable unicode support in config:

./configure --disable-unicode

Seemingly the new version of htop has optional unicode support which needs libncursesw6 - which can
be disabled.

[fasterit]

@GHPS 18.04 doesn't have libncursesw6 as you can see from https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=libncursesw6
Possibly you installed that from another suite or source and configure gets confused. Better use libncursesw5 and the -dev package that comes with your distro.

[GHPS]

18.04 doesn't have libncursesw6

Yes - that is what I wrote. And what caused the error in the first place...