how to find gcc version on mac

Question

I am using OS 10.9 on mac machine. I want to know the version of gcc I am using. So I tried gcc --version on terminal and it results :

$ gcc --version Configured with: --prefix=/Applications/Xcode5-DP.app/Contents/Developer/usr --with-gxx-include-dir=/Applications/Xcode5-DP.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.9.sdk/usr/include/c++/4.2.1 Apple LLVM version 5.0 (clang-500.1.58) (based on LLVM 3.3svn) Target: x86_64-apple-darwin13.0.0 Thread model: posix 

Here in output, there is no detail related to gcc but clang is there. I am confused whether gcc command executes clang or gcc(gnu).

Answer 1

You seem to not actually have gcc on your path. As of recent versions of Xcode, it installs a "gcc" that is instead a link to Clang.

Answer 2

gcc -dumpversion | cut -f1 -d. 

-dumpversion Print the compiler version (for example, 3.0) — and don't do anything else.

The same works for following compilers/aliases:

cc -dumpversion g++ -dumpversion clang -dumpversion tcc -dumpversion 

Be careful with automate parsing the GCC output:

• Output of --version might be localized (e.g. to Russian, Chinese, etc.)
• GCC might be built with option --with-gcc-major-version-only. And some distros (e.g. Fedora) are already using that
• GCC might be built with option --with-pkgversion. And --version output will contain something like Android (5220042 based on r346389c) clang version 8.0.7 (it's real version string)