mysql: error while loading shared libraries: libncurses.so.6

[Dave Kennard]

I've built mysql from source and am following the post-installation initilisation guide at https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/data-directory-initialization-mysqld.html

However, when I try to acesss mysql to change the temporary root password I get the error:
./bin/mysql: error while loading shared libraries: libncurses.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

When compiling mysql, I configured it with the non-standard location where I have ncurses installed:
-DCURSES_LIBRARY=$HOME/apps/ncurses/lib/libncurses.so -DCURSES_INCLUDE_PATH=$HOME/apps/ncurses/include/

So it should be looking in the correct place for libncurses.so.6, though since the error message doesn't give the full path I can't be sure. It's also interesting that it's looking for libncurses.so.6 (which does exist) even though I specified libncurses.so (with no version number). libncurses.so is a symlink to libncurses.so.6, which is a symlink to libncurses.so.6.0

Do I also need to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH or LDFLAGS when configuring, or is there some other reason why it can't find the shared lib? It seems strange that it compiled OK if it wasn't looking in the right place for ncurses.