Question

Is there a way to inhibit the default library path search with gcc? -nostdinc does this for the include path search, but -nostdlib, either by omission or by design, only inhibits the -lc -lgcc etc. but not the library search paths.

Answer 1

You should be able to do this with spec files (although fiddling with these seems like something of a dark art to me…).

If you look at the output of gcc -dumpspecs, the link_command spec is the one that builds the actual command that is invoked. Digging through some of the other specs it references, the link_libgcc spec, which is usually defined (for native compilers at least) as:

*link_libgcc:
%D

is the culprit:

%D

Dump out a -L option for each directory that GCC believes might contain startup files. If the target supports multilibs then the current multilib directory will be prepended to each of these paths.

You can override it by creating a file (e.g. my.specs) which substitutes paths of your choice:

*link_libgcc:
-L/foo/bar -L/blah/blah

and then passing -specs=my.specs to gcc.