I don t understand -Wl -rpath -Wl

Question

For convenience I added the relevant manpages below    My  mis understanding first  If I need to separate options with    that means that the second -Wl is not another option because it comes before   which means it is an argument to the -rpath option    I don t understand how -rpath can have a -Wl   argument    What would make sense in my mind would be this   -Wl -rpath     This should invoke -rpath linker option with the current directory argument     man gcc      -Wl option       Pass option as an option to the   linker  If option contains commas  it   is split into multiple options at the   commas  You can use this syntax to   pass an argument to the option  For   example  -Wl -Map output map passes   -Map output map to the linker  When   using the GNU linker  you can also get   the same effect with    -Wl -Map output map     man ld      -rpath dir       Add a directory to the   runtime library search path  This is   used when linking an ELF executable   with shared objects  All -rpath   arguments are concatenated and passed   to the runtime linker  which uses them   to locate shared objects at runtime    The -rpath option is also used when   locating shared objects which are   needed by shared objects explicitly   included in the link

User · Answer

The man page makes it pretty clear   If you want to pass two arguments  -rpath and    to the linker you can write  -Wl -rpath     or alternatively  -Wl -rpath -Wl     The arguments -Wl -rpath   you suggested do NOT make sense to my   mind   How is gcc supposed to know that your second argument     is supposed to be passed to the linker instead of being interpreted normally   The only way it would be able to know that is if it had insider knowledge of all possible linker arguments so it knew that -rpath required an argument after it

User · Answer

The -Wl xxx option for gcc passes a comma-separated list of tokens as a space-separated list of arguments to the linker  So  gcc -Wl aaa bbb ccc   eventually becomes a linker call  ld aaa bbb ccc   In your case  you want to say  ld -rpath     so you pass this to gcc as -Wl -rpath   Alternatively  you can specify repeat instances of -Wl   gcc -Wl aaa -Wl bbb -Wl ccc   Note that there is no comma between aaa and the second -Wl   Or  in your case  -Wl -rpath -Wl

User · Answer

You could also write  -Wl -rpath     To get rid of that pesky space   It s arguably more readable than adding extra commas  it s exactly what gets passed to ld

User · Answer

One other thing  You may need to specify the -L option as well - eg  -Wl -rpath  path to foo -L path to foo -lbaz   or you may end up with an error like  ld  cannot find -lbaz

[gcc] I don't understand -Wl,-rpath -Wl,

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