How to Compile and Run C/C++ program on Ubuntu 11.10

1. Write and save the program

Open a simple text editor (e.g gedit), IDE (Eclipse) or command line code editor (Nano or Vim). I’ll be using gedit as it is very simple to use and it’s recommended for beginner programmers. Right Click on Desktop or any directory (Browse File using Nautilus) and select create new File – hello.c (.c extension is used to indicate that it’s a c program). Then write a simple program like this (and save the program press Ctrl+S)

#include<stdio.h>

void main()
{
 printf("Hello! This is my first C program with Ubuntu 11.10\n");
 /* Do something more if you want */
}

2. Compile the program

GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) is installed by default, in Ubuntu. To compile the program, open the terminal and move on to the target directory type the command – (where gcc implies compiler name, then it asks for the file name of the source program while -o option specifies the file name of the output program)

gcc hello.c -o hello1

If there is no syntax/semantic error in you program then the compiler will successfully generate an executable file, otherwise fix the problem in your code.

3. Execute the program

To execute the program, you need to run -

./hello1

Compiling and Executing C++ program

The steps are almost same as above but you need to install g++ compiler, the file extension should be .cpp and in compilation phase replace gcc with g++. To install G++ compiler, execute the command -

sudo apt-get install g++

If you have any problems then share it through comments. One more thing, This video might help you in running your first C program in Ubuntu 11.10(I’ve recorded it in Gnome Shell interface) -