[SOLVED] How to link a simple program in Windows with Mingw GCC

Issue

I have a simple "Hello World!" c program, named hello.c on my desktop:

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
    printf("Hello world!\n");

    return 0;
}

I run the following commands.

• I pre-process it with : cpp hello.c > hello.i
• I compile it with : gcc -S hello.i
• I assemble it with : as -o hello.o hello.s

All good so far. But, i'm unable to link it. I've tried, among other commands, these:

ld -o hello.exe hello.o
ld -o hello.exe hello.o -lgcc
ld -o hello.exe hello.o -nostdlib -lgcc

Nothing works. The link errors i get in every single case are :

hello.o:hello.c:(.text+0x9): undefined reference to `__main'
hello.o:hello.c:(.text+0x15): undefined reference to `puts'

How can i link this assembled program hello.o in order to finally produce the executable program hello.exe? What am i missing? [Using Windows 8.1, Mingw version 0.6.2.] Thanks in advance.

Solution

Even if your answers to clarification questions are not particularly useful:

Try something like

ld hello.o -lmsvcrt -entry=_main -subsystem=console -o hello.exe

If you want to see the linker command line the standard gcc uses, invoke gcc like so:

gcc test.c -o test -Wl,-v

The last lines output is what you should be using...

Answered By - tofro