I don't understand -Wl,-rpath -Wl,

Question

The -Wl,xxx option for gcc passes a comma-separated list of tokens as a space-separated list of arguments to the linker. So

gcc -Wl,aaa,bbb,ccc

eventually becomes a linker call

ld aaa bbb ccc

In your case, you want to say "ld -rpath .", so you pass this to gcc as -Wl,-rpath,. Alternatively, you can specify repeat instances of -Wl:

gcc -Wl,aaa -Wl,bbb -Wl,ccc

Note that there is no comma between aaa and the second -Wl.

Or, in your case, -Wl,-rpath -Wl,..

You could also write

-Wl,-rpath=.

To get rid of that pesky space. It's arguably more readable than adding extra commas (it's exactly what gets passed to ld).

One other thing. You may need to specify the -L option as well - eg

-Wl,-rpath,/path/to/foo -L/path/to/foo -lbaz

or you may end up with an error like

ld: cannot find -lbaz

The man page makes it pretty clear. If you want to pass two arguments (-rpath and .) to the linker you can write

-Wl,-rpath,.

or alternatively

-Wl,-rpath -Wl,.

The arguments -Wl,-rpath . you suggested do NOT make sense to my mind. How is gcc supposed to know that your second argument (.) is supposed to be passed to the linker instead of being interpreted normally? The only way it would be able to know that is if it had insider knowledge of all possible linker arguments so it knew that -rpath required an argument after it.