Telling gcc directly to link a library statically

Question

It feels  strange to me to use -Wl -Bstatic in order to tell gcc which libraries I want to link with statically  After all I m telling gcc directly all other information about linking with libraries  -Ldir  -llibname    Is it possible to tell the gcc driver directly which libraries should be linked statically   Clarification  I know that if a certain library exists only in static versions it ll use it  without -Wl -Bstatic  but I want to imply gcc to prefer the static library  I also know that specifying the library file directly would link with it  but I prefer to keep the semantic for including static and dynamic libraries the same

User · Accepted Answer

It is possible of course  use -l  instead of -l  For example -l libXYZ a to link with libXYZ a  Notice the lib written out  as opposed to -lXYZ which would auto expand to libXYZ

User · Answer

You can add  a file in the linking command     gcc yourfiles  path to library libLIBRARY a   But this is not talking with gcc driver  but with ld linker as options like -Wl anything are   When you tell gcc or ld -Ldir -lLIBRARY  linker will check both static and dynamic versions of library  you can see a process with -Wl --verbose   To change order of library types checked you can use -Wl -Bstatic and -Wl -Bdynamic  Here is a man page of gnu LD  http   linux die net man 1 ld  To link your program with lib1  lib3 dynamically and lib2 statically  use such gcc call   gcc program o -llib1 -Wl -Bstatic -llib2 -Wl -Bdynamic -llib3   Assuming that default setting of ld is to use dynamic libraries  it is on Linux

[gcc] Telling gcc directly to link a library statically

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