CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gcc
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Reputation: 155

What does gcc -DPIC do?

What exactly does -DPIC do when compiling using GCC, and when is it really necessary?

I found that -fpic and -fPIC are to generate Position Independent Code. But I could not find anything about -DPIC.

Upvotes: 6

Views: 3203

Answers (1)

Toby Speight
Toby Speight

Reputation: 30911

This is just a preprocessor macro definition. The GCC manual says:

-D NAME

Predefine NAME as a macro, with definition 1.

-D NAME=DEFINITION

The contents of DEFINITION are tokenized and processed as if they appeared during translation phase three in a #define directive.

This might be useful if your source code cares whether it's being compiled as position-independent code. For example:

#ifdef PIC
   /* ... */
#endif

Upvotes: 8

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