CODEWITHSUNDEEP
clinuxarchive
metarose
metarose

Reputation: 301

Where is the archive files on Linux?

I am learning C from a book. The book mentioned archive files:

An archive contains .o files Ever used a .zip or a .tar file? Then you know how easy it is to create a file that contains other files. That’s exactly what a .a archive file is: a file containing other files. Open up a terminal or a command prompt and change into one of the library directories. These are the directories like /usr/lib or C:\MinGW\lib that contain the library code. In a library directory, you’ll find a whole bunch of .a archives. And there’s a command called nm that you can use to look inside them.

However When I looked up the lib location(on Ubuntu) that book says, didn't find archive files. How can I see these archive files?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 3087

Answers (2)

mim.ms
mim.ms

Reputation: 112

It depends on the software packages you have installed.

For example, if you install traceroute, then you should see something like this in /usr/lib/:

# ls -l /usr/lib/*.a
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 22448 Aug 29 12:45 /usr/lib/libsupp.a

You can easily make your own library. For example:

mylib.c

int hello()
{
    return 1;
}

test.c

#include <stdio.h>

int hello();

int main()
{
    printf("Hello returned: %d\n", hello());
    return 0;
}

Execute:

$ cc -c -o mylib.o mylib.c
$ ar r mylib.a mylib.o
$ cc -o test test.c mylib.a

$ ./test 
Hello returned: 1

Upvotes: 1

P.P
P.P

Reputation: 121417

The location of system libraries could change slightly across different distributions. On Ubuntu, you can find the static libraries in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu and /usr/lib32 for 64-bit and 32-bit respectively (This is, in fact, slightly different in older Ubuntu distros. But on recent distros (>Ubuntu 12), this has been consistent).

Upvotes: 2

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