James Nickson <jaynicks@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> asks why a hello-world test produced a 471K executable program. I suspect that what Jack was seeing in the simple hello.c test is the difference between static and dynamic linking. For example, on Sun Solaris 8: % gcc -o hello hello.c % ls -l hello -rwxrwxr-x 1 beebe staff 6196 Aug 12 06:38 hello % gcc -static -o hello hello.c % ls -l hello -rwxrwxr-x 1 beebe staff 363296 Aug 12 06:39 hello While dynamic linking is the default on all modern operating systems, there are cases (e.g., CD-ROM distribution of software and standalone boot and rescue disks) where static linking is required to avoid dependencies on shared libraries that might be in different locations on some remote system than on the system where the executable was built, or might be corrupted (consider what happens to your Unix system if /lib/libc.so.1 develops a bad disk block: virtually nothing can run). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe@xxxxxxx beebe@xxxxxxxxxxxx - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
