Linux Development Platform: Configuring, Using, and Maintaining a Complete Programming Environment, The

3.3. Compiling a Program

The GCC compiler is commonly invoked using the gcc command. The command accepts many command line switches that can be used to invoke different options for the compilation process. You can use the same command line switch multiple times. For example, if you need to specify multiple include paths, you can use –I option multiple times. However you can't combine two switches into one. For example –c and –o can't be combined as –co. This section provides information about different methods of compilation and things you need to consider in the compilation process. Please note that in most of software development projects, you don't invoke gcc from the command line. Instead, the GNU make utility that reads one or many Makefiles ...