How to choose the default gcc and g++ version?

First erase the current update-alternatives setup for gcc and g++:

sudo update-alternatives --remove-all gcc 
sudo update-alternatives --remove-all g++

Install Packages

It seems that both gcc-4.3 and gcc-4.4 are installed after install build-essential. However, we can explicitly install the following packages:

sudo apt-get install gcc-4.3 gcc-4.4 g++-4.3 g++-4.4

Install Alternatives

Symbolic links cc and c++ are installed by default. We will install symbol links for gcc and g++, then link cc and c++ to gcc and g++ respectively. (Note that the 10, 20 and 30 options are the priorities for each alternative, where a bigger number is a higher priority.)

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-4.3 10
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-4.4 20

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-4.3 10
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-4.4 20

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/cc cc /usr/bin/gcc 30
sudo update-alternatives --set cc /usr/bin/gcc

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/c++ c++ /usr/bin/g++ 30
sudo update-alternatives --set c++ /usr/bin/g++

Configure Alternatives

The last step is configuring the default commands for gcc, g++. It's easy to switch between 4.3 and 4.4 interactively:

sudo update-alternatives --config gcc
sudo update-alternatives --config g++

Or switch using script:

#!/bin/sh

if [ -z "$1" ]; then
    echo "usage: $0 version" 1>&2
    exit 1
fi

if [ ! -f "/usr/bin/gcc-$1" ] || [ ! -f "/usr/bin/g++-$1" ]; then
    echo "no such version gcc/g++ installed" 1>&2
    exit 1
fi

update-alternatives --set gcc "/usr/bin/gcc-$1"
update-alternatives --set g++ "/usr/bin/g++-$1"

execute in terminal :

gcc -v
g++ -v

Okay, so that part is fairly simple. The tricky part is that when you issue the command GCC it is actually a sybolic link to which ever version of GCC you are using. What this means is we can create a symbolic link from GCC to whichever version of GCC we want.

  • You can see the symbolic link :
ls -la /usr/bin | grep gcc-4.4
ls -la /usr/bin | grep g++-4.4
  • So what we need to do is remove the GCC symlink and the G++ symlink and then recreate them linked to GCC 4.3 and G++ 4.3:
rm /usr/bin/gcc
rm /usr/bin/g++

ln -s /usr/bin/gcc-4.3 /usr/bin/gcc
ln -s /usr/bin/g++-4.3 /usr/bin/g++
  • Now if we check the symbolic links again we will see GCC & G++ are now linked to GCC 4.3 and G++ 4.3:
ls -la /usr/bin/ | grep gcc
ls -la /usr/bin/ | grep g++
  • Finally we can check our GCC -v again and make sure we are using the correct version:
gcc -v
g++ -v

Is this really desirable? There are ABI changes between gcc versions. Compiling something with one version (eg the entire operating system) and then compiling something else with another version, can cause conflict.

For example, kernel modules should always be compiled with the same version of gcc used to compile the kernel. With that in mind, if you manually altered the symlink between /usr/bin/gcc and the version used in your version of Ubuntu, future DKMS-built modules might use the wrong gcc version.

If you just want to build things with a different version of gcc, that's easy enough, even with makescripts. For example, you can pass in the version of gcc in the CC environment variable:

CC="gcc-4.5" ./configure
CC="gcc-4.5" make

You might not need it on the make command (configure scripts usually pull it in) but it doesn't hurt.

Tags:

Gcc

G++

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