4 ms·

As others have pointed out it's an elf file called a.out. I would like to ask who's idea it was to name GCCs default output after a completely different file f

• naniwaduni 8y ago
  The format was named for the file, not the file for the format. By the time this became incongruous, it was too late to fix.
• Arnt 8y ago
  gcc copied most of its command-line arguments from older compilers, including -o, and the default value if -o isn't set was also copied. So the command-line arguments and defaults are older than the ELF format. When ELF support was added, the question was: Should the default value for -o depend on other arguments? There didn't seem to be good reason to have a complicated default, and keeping the simple default provided compatibility with old scripts and makefiles. cd tests ; for a in *.c ; do gcc $a && ./a.out ; done