I don't understand -Wl,-rpath -Wl,

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