Greetings, I'm having a weird seg fault problem. My application dumps a core file at runtime. After digging into it I found it died in this block: #include <lib1/c.h> ... x::c obj; obj.func1(); I defined class c in a library lib1: namespace x { struct c { c(); ~c(); void fun1(); vector<char *> _data; }; } x::c::c() { } x::c::~c() { for ( int i = 0; i < _data.size(); ++i ) delete _data[i]; } I could not figure it out for some time till I ran nm on the lib1.so file: there are more function definitions than I defined: x::c::c() x::c::c() x::c::~c() x::c::~c() x::c::func1() x::c::func2() After searching in code base I found someone else defined a class with same name in same namespace, but in another library lib2 as follows: namespace x { struct c { c(); ~c(); void func2(); vector<string> strs_; }; } x::c::c() { } x::c::~c() { } My application links to lib2, which has dependency on lib1. This interesting behavior brings several questions: Why would it even work? I would expect a "multiple definitions" error while linking against lib2 (which depends upon lib1) but never had such. The application seems to be doing what's defined in func1 except it dumps a core at runtime. After attaching debugger, I found my application calls the ctor of class c in lib2, then calls func1 (defined in lib1). When going out of scope it calls dtor of class c in lib2, where the seg fault occurs. Can anybody teach me how this could even occur? How can I prevent such problems from happening again? Is there any C++ syntax I can use? Forgot to mention I'm using g++ 4.1 on RHEL4, thank you very much!