Question

I am curious what the POSIX c99 utility is usually implemented as in GNU/Linux distributions.

I realize that this is really a question that should be answered by each distribution’s documentation, but both the manpage on my openSUSE 11.4 install and Ubuntu’s manpage basically just list similar information as the POSIX standard, without specifying what the compiler actually is (i.e., is it GCC, Clang or something else).

So does anyone know what the common practice is? My guess would be that it is a wraper for gcc with the -std=c99 option, perhaps with -pedantic added to conform more closely with the C99 standard.

Answer 1

Usually, it’s indeed a wrapper for gcc -std=c99, though it might select a compiler based on the environment variable CC. You can check for yourself by doing file /usr/bin/c99 and reading it if it’s a shell script, or checking where it points to if it’s a symlink.