How to compile C program on command line using MinGW

Question

What command does one have to enter at the command line in Windows 7 to compile a basic C program   Like I am literally wondering what you type in the command prompt  to compile a  c file   I tried    gt  gcc foo c   But it says     gcc  is not recognized as an internal or external command    operable program or batch file    I also tried    gt  minGW foo c   But I got back              minGW  is not recognized as an internal or external command     operable program or batch file    I have a path environment variable set to where MinGW is installed   C  Program Files  x86  CodeBlocks MinGW bin   I can t really find any information on where I m going wrong  and can t find anything in the official MinGW documentation  as it seems like this is something so simple  sort of an embarrassing question  that it s figured people know what to do

User · Answer

Where is your gcc   My gcc is in  C  Program Files CodeBlocks MinGW bin      C  Program Files CodeBlocks MinGW bin gcc  -c  foo c   C  Program Files CodeBlocks MinGW bin gcc   foo o  -o  foo 01 exe

User · Answer

make as usual    Just make sure you have it in your path and correct Makefile

User · Answer

You can permanently include the directory of the MinGW file  by clicking on My Computer  Properties  Advanced system settings  Environment variables  then edit and paste your directory

User · Answer

I encountered the same error message after unpacking MinGW archives to C  MinGW and setting the path to environment variable as C  MinGW bin    When I try to compile I get this error      gcc  error  CreateProcess  No such file or directory   I finally figured out that some of the downloaded archives were reported broken while unpaking them to C  MinGW  yet I ignored this initially    Once I deleted the broken files and re-downloaded the whole archives again from SourceForge  unpacked them to C  MinGW successfully the error was gone  and the compiler worked fine and output my desired hello exe   I ran this    gcc hello c -o hello   The result result was this  a blinking underscore

User · Answer

I am quite late answering this question  5 years to be exact  but I hope this helps someone    I suspect that this error is because of the environment variables instead of GCC  When you set a new environment variable you need to open a new Command Prompt  This is the issue 90  of the time  when I first downloaded GCC I was stuck with this for 3 hours   If this isn t the case  you probably haven t set the environment variables properly or you are in a folder with spaces in the name   Once you have GCC working  it can be a hassle to compile and delete every time  If you don t want to install a full ide and already have python installed  try this github project  https   github com sophiadm notepad-is-effort It is a small IDE written with tkinter in python  You can just copy the source code and save it as a  py file

User · Answer

Just set the environment variable to the EXACT path to gcc exe like this   C  Program Files  x86  CodeBlocks MinGW bin gcc exe

User · Answer

I had the same problem with  c files that contained functions  not main   of my program   For example  my header files were  fact h  and  fact c   and my main program was  main c  so my commands were like this   E  proj gt  gcc -c fact c   Now I had an object file of fact c  fact o   after that   E  proj gt gcc -o prog exe fact o main c   Then my program  prog exe  was ready to use and worked properly  I think that -c after gcc was important  because it makes object files that can attach to make the program we need  Without using -c  gcc ties to find main in your program and when it doesn t find it  it gives you this error

User · Answer

I ve had this problem and couldn t find why it kept happening  The reason is simple  Once you have set up the environment paths  you have to close the CMD window  and open it again for it be aware of new environment paths

User · Answer

First   Add your minGW s bin folder directory   ex  C mingw64 bin   in System variables    Path  visual example    Compile    c  gcc filename c -o desire   cpp  g   filename cpp -o desire    Run    desire  or   desire

User · Answer

It indicates it couldn t find gcc exe      I have a path environment variable set to where MinGW is installed   Maybe you haven t set the path correctly   echo  path    shows the path to gcc exe  Otherwise  compilation is similar to Unix   gcc filename c -o filename

User · Answer

Instead of setting the  PATH  you may enter your msys shell  In standard msys and mingw installation gcc is in path  so you can run gcc or which gcc   I have a batch file sh bat on my Windows 7  in  PATH    C  lang msys bin sh exe --login      Whenever I want to use gcc I enter cmd  then sh  then gcc  I find it very convenient   When working with linux originated software avoid spaced directories like Program Files  Install them rather to Program Files  The same regards to tools that you may want to run from msys environment

User · Answer

If you pasted your text into the path variable and added a whitespace before the semicolon  you should delete that and add a backslash at the end of the directory   C  Program Files  x86  CodeBlocks MinGW bin

User · Answer

In Windows 10  similar steps can be followed in other versions of windows   Right Click on  My Computer  select Properties  Goto Advanced System Settings -  Advanced -  Select  Environment Variables       Find  Path  select it and choose edit option -  Click on New and add  C  MinGW bin   or the location of gcc exe  if you have installed at some other location  -  Save and restart command prompt  Gcc should work

User · Answer

I once had this kind of problem installing MinGW to work in Windows  even after I added the right System PATH in my Environment Variables   After days of misery  I finally stumbled on a thread that recommended uninstalling the original MinGW compiler and deleting the C  MinGW folder and installing TDM-GCC MinGW compiler which can be found here   You have options of choosing a 64 32-bit installer from the download page  and it creates the environment path variables for you too

[c] How to compile C program on command line using MinGW?

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