Force gcc to use one linker over another - gcc

Lately I have been working on OS X. Things were going pretty peachy for a while until somehow ld got on my system and now gcc won't use dyld. Furthermore, all of my shared libraries are in *.dylib format, and ld is stubornly ignoring there existance. If I mv ld from PATH, gcc just complains it cant find ld.
Please help me to get gcc back on track and using what it should.

You can try some gcc options. From the man page:
-c Compile or assemble the source files, but do not link. The linking
stage simply is not done. The ultimate output is in the form of an
object file for each source file.
You could then link explicitly using whatever linker you want.

Does it help to symlink ld to dyld?
mv /usr/bin/ld /usr/bin/ld.old
ln -s /usr/bin/dyld /usr/bin/ld
Edit: fixed ld params order

This isn't your exact question, but I had a need to switch to ld.gold, and for that, the -fuse-ld=gold option to gcc was very useful.

look at -Xlinker option
I got it from man gcc
you can double check using some verbose options like -v

Related

Automating GCC Compiler arguments to create easier compilations - Windows OS?

Goal
When I run the command:
gcc -ggdb -std=c99 -Wall -Werror hello.c -lcs50 -o test.exe from the root directory
I am able to build the test.exe file and when I run test.exe all is well (thanks to this post by Manohar Reddy Poreddy)
However all of those flags are a little bit cumbersome and I think it would great to condense them into a 'make' command or similar. How would I do this on windows?
Context
GCC, G++ and GDB all seem to be correctly linked (I used chocolatey which paths everything automatically)
Okay so I found what I was looking for.
I hope this answer can help others. Turns out the utility is called 'make' (no surprises). In your directory you essentially create a 'makefile' where you can include your command line arguments which saves on repeated typing in the command line for each compile.
Here is an excellent response on how to install 'make' for windows and was perfect for my use case as a Chocolatey user.
I also found this resource which helps newcomers begin to get their head round GCC which I highly recommend if you're coming into this like I was and felt completely out of your depth.

How to specifiy library search path with clang

With gcc, you can use the -L option to point to additional library directories. I can't find that option in th manpages in clang. How do we do this? I did find the -I for the include files directories however.
It's just -L, the Clang man pages are apparently still horridly incomplete.

How do I tell if I'm using the GOLD linker?

Someone else in my group built LD for my team to use. How can I tell if it was built with --enable-gold?
Check the symlink /usr/bin/ld via ls -al, if it links to ld.gold or ld.bfd. The rest should be obvious.
Note: Nameing might be slightly different, the above is true for ArchLinux. On other systems ld.gold might be called gold directly and ld.bfd could be called ld.
You are trying to comfirm how gcc is configured. So gcc -v will do the trick.

how to use gcc like assembler?

is it possible? I want to use gcc like assembler and after compile it to executable on ubuntu.
I tried it:
gcc a.asm -o out.o
and from out.o file compiler it to .out executable file.
but I get the following error:
file format not recognized; treating as linker script.
I'm new on linux environment. I hope this is clean for you. Any help is very appreciadted. Thanks in advance.
Change file name a.asm to a.s and let gcc autodetect assembler (by extension).
Read the documentation for the -x option to gcc. It allows you to specify the language of the source file.

gcc -print-prog-name=??? doesn't work as I would expect

if I understand the gcc manuals right than the option -print-prog-name should print the name of the program used.
But it seems that this option only echoes the given argument
Examples:
gcc -print-prog-name=ld
--> ld
gcc -print-prog-name=xxxsome-funny-name
--> xxxsome-funny-name
Is this the expected behaviour? I think it should print something like
gcc -print-prog-name=ld
--> /usr/bin/ld
gcc -print-prog-name=xxxsome-funny-name
--> unknown program
EDIT: testing on Debian Lenny 64bit with gcc v4.2.4
Meanwhile I found another reason for the behaviour of
gcc -print-prog-name=ld
The ld command is not invoked directly by gcc.
gcc invokes collect. And it is collect which in turn invokes ld.
I think the -print-prog-name option only applies to a small set of tools that GCC
uses internally. For example,
$ gcc -print-prog-name=cc1
/usr/libexec/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/3.4.5/cc1
$ ls -L /usr/libexec/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/3.4.5/
cc1 cc1plus collect2 f771 jc1 jvgenmain
$ gcc -print-prog-name=f771
/usr/libexec/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/3.4.5/f771
So gcc -print-prog-name is aware of the tools that live in that directory. But:
$ gcc -print-prog-name=ld
ld
My guess is that if gcc -print-prog-name returns an absolute path, it's configured
to use that version of the program, no matter what's on your $PATH -- otherwise
it just echoes back what you gave it without resolving it to an absolute pathname.

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