We've been compiling and executing code by clicking the Run button. There may be scenarios where we will want to compile code in the absence of an IDE (Integrated Development Environment - Visual Studio, Xcode), for example if we wanted to deploy code on a remote server, on a cloud server, or remote high performance computing cluster. In such a scenario, we can compile and run code from the command line (aka, terminal, shell). For the following example we will be using the following files which are in this directory:
- main.cpp is the file that contains the
int main() {}
function. - factorial.cpp contains a supporting function
factorial()
called by main.cpp. - print.cpp also contains a supporting function
print()
called by main.cpp. - function.h is a header file that declares the supporting functions
factorial()
andprint()
.
We can access the shell directly in repl.it (which is a linux ubuntu terminal) and compile the code as follows:
clang++-7 -o main factorial.cpp main.cpp print.cpp
clang++-7
is the compiler (alternatively one may use g++).-o main
defines the name of the output executable.factorial.cpp main.cpp print.cpp
defines the input source files.
We will now find an executable that we can execute from the command line.
./main
The resulting output should be:
Factorial of [7] is: 5040