How to Compile and Run C/C++ program on Ubuntu 11.10

alexis_arte
  11 years ago
  16

Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) is one of the most popular operating system for programming because there are lot of great open source applications, tools, compilers, debuggers, IDEs are available free of cost. Some of them are  - GCC – The greatest compiler for C language (from FSF (‘Free Software Foundation’ by Stallman); Linux Torwalds used GCC while developing Linux Kernel), Eclipse IDE (The most popular ‘Integrated Development Environment’ for Java programmers), Netbeans, KDevelop, Codelite  etc.

C/C++ language is a high level programming language (although the term high and low is used in relative sense e.g C is a high level language as compared to Assembly but if we compare it with java then C is a low level programming language; the term high or low basically describes the closeness with hardware). Most of the operating systems has been written in C language. This post has been written for beginners who just started learning C/C++ or the programmers who have migrated from Windows to Ubuntu (although the commands are almost same for all Linux based operating system).

Compiling and Executing C program in Ubuntu 11.10

1. Write and save the program

c programming in ubuntu 11.10

Open a simple text editor (e.g gedit), IDE (Eclipse) or command line code editor (Nano or Vim). I’ll be using gedit as it is very simple to use and it’s recommended for beginner programmers. Right Click on Desktop or any directory (Browse File using Nautilus) and select create new File – hello.c (.c extension is used to indicate that it’s a c program). Then write a simple program like this (and save the program press Ctrl+S)

#include<stdio.h>

void main()
{
 printf("Hello! This is my first C program with Ubuntu 11.10\n");
 /* Do something more if you want */
}

2. Compile the program

GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) is installed by default, in Ubuntu. To compile the program, open the terminal and move on to the target directory type the command – (where gcc implies compiler name, then it asks for the file name of the source program while -o option specifies the file name of the output program)

gcc hello.c -o hello1

If there is no syntax/semantic error in you program then the compiler will successfully generate an executable file, otherwise fix the problem in your code.

3. Execute the program

To execute the program, you need to run -

./hello1

running a C program in Ubuntu 11.10

Compiling and Executing C++ program

The steps are almost same as above but you need to install g++ compiler, the file extension should be .cpp and in compilation phase replace gcc with g++. To install G++ compiler, execute the command -

sudo apt-get install g++

If you have any problems then share it through comments. One more thing, This video might help you in running your first C program in Ubuntu 11.10(I’ve recorded it in Gnome Shell interface) -

Comments
sidsingh 9 years ago

Thanks.


roht 11 years ago

very simple to understand. Great job.


abd_bela 11 years ago

But if you need extra function like sin or cos, you need to include
math.h in the source file for compilation and -lm for link, like

gcc myprog.c -o myprog -lm ( g++ for c++)