A Trip to the C Library. Creating Static Libraries

Thomas Francis
1 min readFeb 28, 2021

--

“For whosoever reads this, immense power will bestow them… probably.”

The shallow version:

To compile all your C files in the directory to object files:

gcc -c *.c

To create a library:

ar -rc yourlibraryname.a *.o

Then index your library:

ranlib yourlibraryname.a

The in-depth version:

We use libraries to organize information, which often simplifies access to that information. The same can be said for C libraries, in which a library could house many small functions and scripts, rather than having a huge collection of files in a directory.

Once the library is built, the program main.o can be compiled to an executable with the following command:

cc main.o -L. -lyourlibraryname -o prog

where -L tells the linker to look for the library in the current directory and where -l indicates that this is the name of the library.

But what about the “ranlib” command?

The ranlib command is used to index the library so that symbol look-up is faster in the library. It’s easier to find a book in a shelf when the collection is in alphabetical order. It’s similar with finding code in a collection of scripts.

Finally, please note that libraries are compiled different on mac laptops with M1 chips.

--

--

Thomas Francis
Thomas Francis

Written by Thomas Francis

Is currently student at Holberton New Haven

No responses yet