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;
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,.
.
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).
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
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.