How can I get the libncursesw.so.6 file? Install is "up to date" but files do not exist

Question

I recently went to try to debug a program with GDB and got the following error: gdb: error while loading shared libraries: libncursesw.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

So I went investigating and tried the obvious things, ie sudo apt-get install libncursesw5 (and dev variants) and apt reports that I've already got the latest version...so next I tried reinstalling GDB, problem persists. The output of ldd with GDB confirms to me that it still doesn't know where this mythical libncursesw.so.6 file is, so I go digging around in the usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu folder and run ls libncu* which returns six results: libncurses.a, libncurses++.a, libncurses.so, libncurses++w.a, libncursesw.a, and libncursesw.so...but no libncursesw.so.6. I then naively attempted to just make a copy of libncursesw.so named libncursesw.so.6, to which gdb reports that this file is "too short".

In googling I can't seem to find a good explanation on how to get this file in place? Every other answer I see just suggests running sudo apt-get install libncursesw5 (or something similar) but I've already tried pretty much every variant of that I can think of. I was going to remove it and then reinstall it but when I went to do that it gave me a scary warning that I could be doing something potentially harmful to my system so I aborted that idea.

Some context that also might(?) help: I'm running a pretty recent install of Linux Mint 19.3 Cinnamon, and this was my first time trying to run GDB on my new computer. I basically set this new computer up as a new install, just porting over my home directory and a couple of the more useful hidden . files from my old laptop...I figure this shouldn't be the reason GDB is failing/these files don't exist on the new machine but just in case I'm mentioning it.

Answer 1

obvious things, ie sudo apt-get install libncursesw5

You want libncursesw6, not libncursesw5.