Header absolute paths for GCC

Question

I am looking to print a list of absolute paths to a specific header file used by gcc without compiling anything (or specifying a particular compile target, like with gcc -M). E.g., the following would print a list of absolute paths with all matches for limits.h found in the appropriate directories:

gcc <flag/command> limits.h

A (non-)solution that returns only working header files is to simply create a check.c, #include all desired header names there, and run gcc -M check.c.

Another solution, (albeit using bash stuff) is found in this answer and here.

Related questions that didn't quite have what I want:

larsks · Accepted Answer · 2024-09-07 23:47:48Z

1

It looks like you could use this answer and a little shell scripting to do what you want; e.g:

$ gcc -xc -E -v - < /dev/null 2>&1 |
  sed -n '/#include <...>/,/End of search list/ {/#include/d; /End/d; p};' |
  xargs -IPATH find PATH -name limits.h
/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/14/include/limits.h
/usr/include/c++/14/tr1/limits.h
/usr/include/linux/limits.h
/usr/include/limits.h

Or alternatively, maybe something like this:

$ echo '#include <limits.h>' | gcc -E - | grep '/limits.h' | cut -f2 -d'"' | sort -u
/usr/include/limits.h
/usr/include/linux/limits.h
/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/14/include/limits.h

edited Sep 7, 2024 at 23:47

answered Sep 7, 2024 at 23:29

larsks

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4 Comments

shea Over a year ago

This gets the job done on Linux! Preferably looking for something just using gcc (in part for portability to MacOS & Windows, also to avoid having to macro a version of this sucker on all my machines).

larsks Over a year ago

This will probably work just fine on MacOS, too. I don't know what sort of common Unix tools are typically included with gcc on Windows, but things like grep, sed, and cut are pretty common.

shea Over a year ago

result on MacOS is sed: 1: "/#include <...>/,/End o ...": extra characters at the end of p command, could be a little thing but not sure how to troubleshoot that

larsks Over a year ago

I'll have access to a MacOS system later this evening so I can check. Meanwhile, try the second solution I posted.

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