On 14 May 2005, Arturas Moskvinas stipulated: >> i want to use path which starts with user home `~'. >> how to do it? > > There is global variable PATH in *nix (at least linix), so you can > change it to your likings. I don't think that has anything to do with the question. (And $PATH is not a global variable; it's an environment variable, which is a quite different entity and not `global' in any meaningful sense; it's per-process. It's been present in Unix pretty much forever: I can't say how long because it's probably older than I am.) gumbold, do you mean that you want to use a path in a specs file which is relative to a user's home directory, or that you want GCC to look for its specs file somewhere underneath a user's home directory? The latter is trivial: `gcc -specs=${HOME}/somewhere/....' and the shell does the work of variable expansion before GCC ever gets involved. For the former, I think you're stuck: there is no mechanism in the specs language to substitute environment variables (although adding one to GCC wouldn't be hard). The closest you can get without adding such a mechanism is a wrapper around GCC which preprocesses a pre-specs file, substituting some variables, and then runs the GCC driver with the -specs= argument on the resulting file. I'd think it would probably be easier to add the feature to GCC: if you're modifying the specs file, you can probably do that too (and submit the patch :) ) -- `End users are just test loads for verifying that the system works, kind of like resistors in an electrical circuit.' - Kaz Kylheku in c.o.l.d.s