Location of C standard library

If you are looking for libc.a:

$ gcc --print-file-name=libc.a
/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.8/../../../x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.a

A few things:

• gcc and glibc are two different things. gcc is the compiler, glibc are the runtime libraries. Pretty much everything needs glibc to run.
• .a files are static libraries, .so means shared object and is the Linux equivalent of a DLL
• Most things DON'T link against libc.a, they link against libc.so

Hope that clears it up for you. As for the location, it's almost certainly going to be in /usr/lib/libc.a and / or /usr/lib/libc.so. Like I said, the .so one is the more common.

If you are on RPM based Linux (Red Hat/CentOS/Fedora/SUSE) then you would get the location of the installed glibc with rpm -ql glibc and rpm -ql glibc-devel .

locate libc.a would get you the location. And to see from where it comes do: rpm -qf /usr/lib/libc.a

Here is what rpm -qi has to tell about these packages

glibc-devel:

The glibc-devel package contains the object files necessary for developing programs which use the standard C libraries (which are used by nearly all programs). If you are developing programs which will use the standard C libraries, your system needs to have these standard object files available in order to create the executables. Install glibc-devel if you are going to develop programs which will use the standard C libraries

glibc:

The glibc package contains standard libraries which are used by multiple programs on the system. In order to save disk space and memory, as well as to make upgrading easier, common system code is kept in one place and shared between programs. This particular package contains the most important sets of shared libraries: the standard C library and the standard math library. Without these two libraries, a Linux system will not function.