alex - thanks! sorry about that - since i've had to resort to using 1/2 dozen tutorials to figure out each simple step, i now had 6 different conflicting sources of information.. ..as such, following one alleged 'gcc' tutorial, i was successfully compiling examples with a two stage operation: gcc -c -o name.o name.c gcc -mwindows -o name.exe name.o so i guess i was attempting to compile it as a c program as opposed to c++?? :p dumb error, i blame the tutorial :) i've found i can compile c++ using two different commands: gcc name.cpp or: c++ name.cpp (or, now add alex's g++..) which is great, except i have no information about what the difference is, or any clue why they both work when i only have one v. of gcc, beyond i have tutorials that say to do it each way.. curious indeed. i want to write my *first* program to simply create a text file and put a word in it. can i *find* a demo program that addresses just this fundamental, elementary function? NO! :p instead i've got 32 'hello world' programs, each of which are different :) #include <fstream> ofstream out; out.open("testfile.txt"); out << "here is a line" << endl; out.close(); look. i'm totally screwing around in the dark here. i've tried wrapping it all in a 'main' function, leaving parts inside and outside, i'm aware that there is no 'nice, safe,' code for checking to see whether the file exists. could somebody turn this into a nice example of how to make a program that creates a text file, and one day, i'll put it all on the web in a nice tutorial about how to use (install..) gcc coming from basic, in english.. i hate asking for help :p :) -- http://home.earthlink.net/~plattermatic http://www.panicnow.net/~xoxos ----- Original Message ----- From: "rurik leffanta" <plattermatic@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: <gcc-help@xxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Saturday, January 31, 2004 10:22 AM Subject: newbie! > i'm attempting to write my vewy first c++ prog.... > > in order to perform iostream operations, i have to #include <iostream> > > yes? yes. :p (or iostream.h, depending on tutorial..) > > however, 'iostream' is not at the top of my include folder. i am using mingw > 3.1.0-1 (and have successfully compiled example scripts) - the path for > iostream with this install is include/c++/3.2.3 > > i've tried adding the path to the include statement, putting .h at the end > of iostream.. > > sheesh! should i copy everything from the subfolders and put it in the main > folder? what do i have to do here? > -- > http://home.earthlink.net/~plattermatic > http://www.panicnow.net/~xoxos >