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Installing GNU CC

Note most of this information is out of date and superseded by the new GCC install manual gcc/doc/install.texi. It is provided for historical reference only.

• Configuration Files: Files created by running configure.
• Configurations: Configurations Supported by GNU CC.
• Cross-Compiler: Building and installing a cross-compiler.
• VMS Install: See below for installation on VMS.
• Collect2: How collect2 works; how it finds ld.
• Header Dirs: Understanding the standard header file directories.

Here is the procedure for installing GNU CC on a GNU or Unix system. See VMS Install, for VMS systems.

1. If you have chosen a configuration for GNU CC which requires other GNU tools (such as GAS or the GNU linker) instead of the standard system tools, install the required tools in the build directory under the names as, ld or whatever is appropriate. This will enable the compiler to find the proper tools for compilation of the program enquire.

   Alternatively, you can do subsequent compilation using a value of the PATH environment variable such that the necessary GNU tools come before the standard system tools.

2. Specify the host, build and target machine configurations. You do this when you run the configure script.

   The build machine is the system which you are using, the host machine is the system where you want to run the resulting compiler (normally the build machine), and the target machine is the system for which you want the compiler to generate code.

   If you are building a compiler to produce code for the machine it runs on (a native compiler), you normally do not need to specify any operands to configure; it will try to guess the type of machine you are on and use that as the build, host and target machines. So you don't need to specify a configuration when building a native compiler unless configure cannot figure out what your configuration is or guesses wrong.

   In those cases, specify the build machine's configuration name with the --host option; the host and target will default to be the same as the host machine. (If you are building a cross-compiler, see Cross-Compiler.)

   Here is an example:
   

   ./configure --host=sparc-sun-sunos4.1
   

   A configuration name may be canonical or it may be more or less abbreviated.

   A canonical configuration name has three parts, separated by dashes. It looks like this: cpu-company-system. (The three parts may themselves contain dashes; configure can figure out which dashes serve which purpose.) For example, m68k-sun-sunos4.1 specifies a Sun 3.

   You can also replace parts of the configuration by nicknames or aliases. For example, sun3 stands for m68k-sun, so sun3-sunos4.1 is another way to specify a Sun 3.

   You can specify a version number after any of the system types, and some of the CPU types. In most cases, the version is irrelevant, and will be ignored. So you might as well specify the version if you know it.

   See Configurations, for a list of supported configuration names and notes on many of the configurations. You should check the notes in that section before proceeding any further with the installation of GNU CC.