I'm a little confused on the documentation of the -pthread option. I'm posting to gcc-help because I assume by default that I'm just misunderstand things :) http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Option-Index.html On that page, if you scroll down to pthread, the option appears to only apply to a couple of weird targets: Solaris 2 RS/6000 PowerPC But yet I've used this on many platforms, and I have found it to be required to use pthreads on linux. Am I reading the docs wrong?