Question

I have problems generating a small hello-world program in C with ld as linker.

These are my steps so far:

gcc -c hello.c
ld -o hello hello.o -lc

./hello
-bash: ./hello: no such file or directory

hello.c‘s source is here:

#include <stdio.h>
int main(){
    puts("Hello, world!");
    return 0;
}

It seems I have missed an important part here. Neither gcc nor ld had any errors and both ended with return value 0.

Please do not tell me “just use gcc -o hello hello.c“! I have browsed like 10 boards and people always gave that answer. I want to know how to do it the ld-way.

Answer 1

If you want to understand what GCC is actually doing, run it with the -v flag. (For example, gcc -v -o hello hello.c.)

You’re missing some pieces of code that GCC would normally instruct the linker to include. If you look at the output of gcc -v, you’ll see things like crt1.o -lgcc -lgcc_s and others.

See also the GCC documentation for options such as -nostartfiles, -nodefaultlibs, and -nostdlib for some context on these extra bits of code that are being linked in behind the scenes.