Is there a way to get an extern variable (or function) by name

Question

I thought I read about a C standard library function recently that was able to return a pointer to any extern variable whose name was passed to it as a const char *. I think that it works via linker symbols, if that helps.

Answer 1

You could be thinking of dlsym, which is not part of the C standard library but part of the POSIX API.

Answer 2

It depends on the system. dlsym has already been mentioned. Its Windows counterpart is GetProcAddress. In the latter case, the function needs to be not only external but exported.