by guy keren
This document tries to give the reader basic knowledge in compiling C and C++ programs on a Unix system. If you've no knowledge as to how to compile C programs under Unix (for instance, you did that until now on other operating systems), you'd better read this tutorial first, and then write a few programs before you try to get to gdb, makefiles or C libraries. If you're already familiar with that, it's recommended to learn about makefiles, and then go and learn other C programming topics and practice the usage of makefiles, before going on to read about C libraries. This last issue is only relevant to larger projects, while makefiles make sense even for a small program composed of but a few source files.
As a policy, we'll stick with the basic features of programming tools mentioned here, so that the information will apply to more than a single tool version. This way, you might find the information here useful, even if the system you're using does not have the GNU tools installed.
In this lovely tutorial, we'll deal with compilation of a C program, using the compiler directly from the command line. It might be that you'll eventually use a more sophisticated interface (an IDE - Integrated Development Environment) of some sort, but the common denominator you'll always find is the plain command line interface. Further more, even if you use an IDE, it could help you understand how things work "behind the scenes". We'll see how to compile a program, how to combine several source files into a single program, how to add debug information and how to optimize code.