Linker Options

Some of the more important linker options a beginner should know about are:-

-g

This instructs the linker to generate additional information to help when debugging. See section 6.1.6.

-o executable name

This tells the linker the name to give to the output file, for example:-

-o Zoo.exe

-Ldirectory

This tell the linker to look in the directory directory for libraries specified with the -l option (see below). The option can be used any number of times to define additional directories to be searched e.g.:-

g++ -L/cern/root/lib -LMyCode/lib ...

-llibrary_name

This tell the compiler to look for a library to load. It takes library_name and adds the prefix ``lib'' and the suffix either .a or .so and then looks for the library in each of the directories specified with the -L option. For example:-

g++ -L/cern/root/lib -LMyCode/lib -lZoo

would search for:-

/cern/root/lib/libZoo.so

/cern/root/lib/libZoo.a

MyCode/lib/libZoo.so

MyCode/lib/libZoo.a

and take the first match it finds.