HOW TO Use the GCC specs file

HOWTO Use the GCC specs file

• View 
• Revisions

Posted July 25th, 2008 by jonY

• gcc 
• how to 
• mingw

About Specs file

The "gcc" program invoked by users is a convenient front-end driver executable which will invoke other programs in the background such as cc1, as or ld to do its work according to the command line parameter given. A specs file is plain text used to control the default behavior for the "gcc" front-end. The specs file is usually built-in but for flexibility purposes, it can be overridden with an external version. Example use: link against a different version of msvcrt.dll.

Basic Specs file modifications

GCC will produce a specs file via the following command.

gcc -dumpspecs > specs

You may use a text editor of your choice to inspect it. It may be confusing at first, but there are many places of interest. To use the specs file, invoke gcc with-specs=<path_to_specs_file> or place it at "/mingw/lib/gcc/mingw32/<version>/specs" to make GCC use it by default, where <version> refers to the GCC version installed.

Adding include directories to the search path

The *cpp: section should be modified. It contains the following by default:

*cpp:
%{posix:-D_POSIX_SOURCE} %{mthreads:-D_MT}

If "z:\libx\include" needs to be added to the GCC includes search path, it should be changed to the following

*cpp:
%{posix:-D_POSIX_SOURCE} %{mthreads:-D_MT} -I z:/libx/include

Adding lib directories to the search path

The *link_libgcc: section should be modified. It contains the following by default:

*link_libgcc:
%D

If "z:\libx\lib" needs to be added to the GCC library search path, it should be changed to the following

*link_libgcc:
%D -L z:/libx/lib

More Help

GCC-4.3.0 specs file help