Where is the C Compiler?

[Matt Galvin]

On Apr 1, 2005 7:56 PM, Alfred Vahau <alfredv at upng.ac.pg> wrote:
> baza wrote:
> 
> > Daniel Taylor wrote:
> >
> >> Hey,
> >>
> >> This is a slightly off topic question,
> >>
> >> How was gcc complied before gcc was compiled in order for it to be
> >> able to compile gcc? if you understand my chicken vs egg logic.
> >>
> >> Thanks!
> >>
> >> - Daniel
> >>
> > If I have it right Richard Stallman coded it so there would be a
> > 'free' compiler. It was thought to be an important milestone for the
> > GNU project to have a C compiler.
> >
> > Baza
> >
> As a newbie to Debian and in this case Ubuntu, I'd like to thank the
> people for initiating me into Debian and its powerful apt-get command.
> This pointer is sufficient for me to continue on with my project.
> It will be seen from my initial posting that I mention the 'which' and
> the 'find' commands - the two commands that Unix users issue to locate
> the path of a command. In my case, I wanted to know where cc or gcc were
> located.
> 
> Neither of these were on the standard path as which cc or which gcc
> returned zero results.
> But which perl for instance returned /usr/bin/perl so I know that perl
> is o.k as I will need Perl.
> 
> This was strange to me as both cc and gcc are essential commands for
> working in a Unix/Linux environment.

Ubuntu is, i belive, aimed more at being a user/intermediate user
desktop which partially means... make things easy enough that nobody
has to compile stuff manually. It's not a big deal for those of us who
are developers, but for the average user, it can be daunting.

Ubuntu (and Debian) has tons of packages already compiled for us and
readily availible for installation so... the compilers are not so
essential since most of the time we don't need to compile anything ;)

Although if you do need to compile something then compilers, dev
packages, and libs are all availible for installtion via apt/synaptic.

> I downloaded the gcc package from a GNU mirror site and proceeded to
> install following the familiar steps.
> gunzip, tar, configure, make and make install
> 
> The installation failed because the Makefile was looking for the path to
> the cc command to compile gcc.
> I also made similar attempts to install apache from source which also
> failed since the path to a cc compiler could not be found.
> 
> Puzzled, I decided to post reasoning that maybe in Debian things are
> done differently. I now know that apt-get is the one command that I must
> get used to.

Learning how apt works for real and using it on the cli is great, but
for the uninitiated using: System -> Administration-> Synaptic Package
Manager, can be quite helpful and easy to use. Synaptic is the GUI
frontend to apt that allows you to very easily find and install just
about anything you may need.

Hope this helps,

Matt

> Alfred,
> 
> 
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