gcc questions

[Berna Massingill]

On Sun, Nov 27, 2005 at 10:33:36AM -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
>>  On Sat, Nov 26, 2005 at 01:16:25PM +0200, Dotan Cohen wrote:
>>  > Also, all files that gcc outputs are of the name a.out. I want it to
>>  > give the .out file the original name of the file, with a .out. I have
>>  > manned and discovered the -o option, whereby I can specify a filename,
>>  > but I would prefer that it would read the original filename and use
>>  > that. For instance:
>>  > $gcc mycode.c
>>  > $ls
>>  > mycode.c    mycode.out
>>  > How can I encourage this behaviour? Thank you.
>>  
>>  
>>  Oh, hey, I missed this part of the question. There's a neat trick if you
>>  have GNU Make, which you do on Fedora (and just about any Linux distro).
>>  If you have a simple C program with just one source file and no special
>>  linking needs, you can do this:
>>  
>>     make mycode
>>  
>>  Note not mycode.c -- it'll automatically figure out that it can make the
>>  executable mycode from mycode.c. And you don't even have to have a Makefile!

This does produce an executable called "mycode" rather than
"mycode.out" -- which more Unix-ish, but *might* not be what the
OP wants.  

Another neat trick:

The above use of "make" works because "make" has a built-in rule for
compiling "mycode.c" to give "mycode".  You can change / add to the
parameters it uses by providing a makefile (text file called "makefile"
or "Makefile") with a definition of variable CFLAGS.  E.g., if this
file contains the line

CFLAGS= -Wall -pedantic

then "make mycode" will compile mycode.c with the -Wall and -pedantic
flags.  Read about these flags in the "man" page, of course ....

Oh, and if the executable really needs to be called mycode.out?
that can be done with a "pattern rule" in a makefile, or with a little
shell script.  Someone here can probably help with either approach.

-- 
-- blm