For example, on my current machine I recieved The shell searches these directories from left-to-right. What you will see is a colon-separated list of directories. You can see the search path using the shell variable $PATH, hello you are telling the shell exactly where to go to find the executable: your current directory (. It may be that your shell is not set-up to look in your current directory. If it does not find the executable in any of these it gives up its search. In fact it has a very specific order of directories in which it looks for executables. It does not assume that the executable resides in your home directory. What happened is that when you type a command, the shell has to look for the executable to run the command. If you happen to recieve a message from the shell that it cannot find the file, then you will need to type: Just type the name of your executable on the command line: To run your file, you need to make sure that the user file permission for that file is set to x for executable.

If your code compiled you will see the file hello in yourdirectory. You specify the name of your executable, say hello by the following line: By default, gcc places the executable into this file, overwriting anyexisting file of the same name. Now do ls and you will see a file called a.out. If no error messages were printed to the screen, your code compiled. Suppose you have a file hello.c whichyou want to compile (or use hello.c.)Type the following on the command line DO NOT transfer the executable file from one machine to another. ANY program you want to run on a department machine, you should compile on a department machine. But this executable file may notbe readable on other machines.

This file is called an executable file, because it can be executed by the machine. If you are using a Unix machine like Solaris you may need to use the command cc.) When you compile your program the compiler produces a filecontaining binary code which is directly readable by the machine you are on. The Unix command for compiling C code is gcc. This material will be greatly supplemented later in the course. This page is intended for people whowant to practice programming C now. Basic Compiling Basic compiling on the Unix PurposeTo provide basic information on how to compile your C program on Unix.

Compiling code