Tag Archives: compiler

Paths that you need to know for compiling

Compiling and running applications on Linux involves more than just writing code. Developers must also understand the intricacies of environment variables and command-line tools that dictate where compilers and runtime environments look for necessary files. In this post, we will cover some of them.

Default Search Paths

  • Header Files: Compilers like gcc and g++ typically look for header files in standard directories such as /usr/include or /usr/local/include. These are the places where most system and third-party libraries install their header files.
  • Libraries: For libraries, the linker (ld) searches in directories like /usr/lib, /usr/local/lib, and sometimes in more specific directories that depend on the machine’s architecture (like /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu on 64-bit systems).
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Dealing with multiple compilers

I don’t know you, but when I am compiling a complicated program and everything goes straightforward I feel a mixture of joy and surprise. Let’s face it, compiling can be quite frustrating, and if you need to compile something relatively old, chances are that you will spend hours and hours trying to understand the compiler error messages.

Several such compiler errors, that in many cases can be quite convoluted, tell you that your program requires an older version, so you first need to install it. I am going to assume that you have sudo rights, otherwise, we will be playing the game of compiling a compiler, something that I recommend you to do at least and at most once in your life.

In common Linux distributions like Ubuntu, installing an older compiler is as easy as using apt or yum:

#Ubuntu
$ sudo apt install build-essential
$ sudo apt install gcc-7 g++-7
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