It depends a bit on what you want:
A) If you want to specify which libraries to link to, you can use find_library to find libs and then use link_directories and target_link_libraries to.
Of course, it is often worth the effort to write a good find_package script, which nicely adds "imported" libraries with add_library( YourLib IMPORTED ) with correct locations, and platform/build specific pre- and suffixes. You can then simply refer to 'YourLib' and use target_link_libraries.
B) If you wish to specify particular linker-flags, e.g. '-mthreads' or '-Wl,--export-all-symbols' with MinGW-GCC, you can use CMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS. There are also two similar but undocumented flags for modules, shared or static libraries:
CMAKE_MODULE_LINKER_FLAGS
CMAKE_SHARED_LINKER_FLAGS
CMAKE_STATIC_LINKER_FLAGS
For linking against libraries see Andre's answer.
For linker flags - the following 4 CMake variables:
CMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS
CMAKE_MODULE_LINKER_FLAGS
CMAKE_SHARED_LINKER_FLAGS
CMAKE_STATIC_LINKER_FLAGS
can be easily manipulated for different configs (debug, release...) with the ucm_add_linker_flags macro of ucm
If you want to add a flag to every link, e.g. -fsanitize=address then I would not recommend using CMAKE_*_LINKER_FLAGS. Even with them all set it still doesn't use the flag when linking a framework on OSX, and maybe in other situations. Instead use link_libraries():
add_compile_options("-fsanitize=address")
link_libraries("-fsanitize=address")
This works for everything.
Look at:
CMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS
CMAKE_MODULE_LINKER_FLAGS
CMAKE_SHARED_LINKER_FLAGS
CMAKE_STATIC_LINKER_FLAGS
You can specify linker flags in target_link_libraries.
Source: Stackoverflow.com