command to compile c files with .a files

Question

I have several .c files and one .a object file. What command with gcc should I use to compile them to one exe file? If we use a makefile, how will it look like?

Answer 1

For simple cases you can probably do this:

gcc -o maybe.exe useful.a something.c

Makefiles for non-trivial projects usually first invoke gcc to compile each .c file to a .o object.

gcc -c something.c

Then they invoke the linker (these days often using gcc as a wrapper for it) with a list of .o and .a files to link into an output executable.

gcc -o maybe.exe useful.a something.o

Note also that for most installed libraries, it's typical not to explicitly specify the .a file but instead to say -lhandy which would be short for "try to find something called libhandy.a in the configured (or specified with -L) search directories"