Following the chain and playing around with the makefile has yielded the following, judicious use of both -Bdynamic and -Bstatic in front of the different -l statements does in fact change the behavior of the linker so that the desired outcome is achieved. Thank you both for your input. Patrick Weaver China Lake, CA Voice: (760) 939-8744 Email: john.p.weaver(at)navy.mil -----Original Message----- From: Jonathan Wakely [mailto:jwakely.gcc@xxxxxxxxx] Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2011 11:29 To: Weaver, John P CIV Cc: gcc-help@xxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: prefer static linking On Nov 29, 2011 7:03 PM, "Weaver, John P CIV" wrote: > > The gcc compiler prefers to use dynamic libraries in the linking phase. GCC just calls the linker, any preference is the linker's. For the GNU linker -Bdynamic and -Bstatic allow you to control whether dynamic or static libraries are used for each lib named with -l See 'man ld' -----Original Message----- From: Ian Lance Taylor [mailto:iant@xxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2011 11:21 To: Weaver, John P CIV Cc: gcc-help@xxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: prefer static linking "Weaver, John P CIV" <john.p.weaver@xxxxxxxx> writes: > The gcc compiler prefers to use dynamic libraries in the linking > phase. When porting software from one machine to another it is > frequently desirable to link to static libraries as much as possible > to account for different versions of the libraries. The -static flag > is useful when you do not need any dynamic library support but causes > the linker to fail if there is only a dynamic library for a particular > call. Is there a way to ask the linker to use static libraries when > possible and report the dynamic libraries that are needed to complete > the linking process? I am not aware of any such option. If you are using the GNU linker, you can tell it to prefer dynamic libraries using -Bdynamic and tell it to use only static libraries using -Bstatic, but I don't know of any option to tell it to prefer static libraries but use dynamic libraries if they are available. Ian
