mpicc -o test.c deletes test.c

["Rajeev Thakur" <thakur@…>]

The students at Utah discovered that if they mistakenly do "mpicc -o test.c"
instead of "mpicc -c test.c" the test.c file gets deleted :-(. On further
investigation, they found that "gcc -o test.c" does not delete the file, but
"gcc -o test.c -lm" does.

Not sure what we can do about it, but it is annoying to lose your source
file with a typo of "mpicc -o" instead of "mpicc -c".

Rajeev


% mpicc -o test.c    : test.c gets deleted
% gcc -o test.c      : No file gets deleted
% gcc -o test.c -lm  : test.c gets deleted

[Rajeev Thakur]

This message has 0 attachment(s)

[goodell]

I'm inclined to say that this is simply user error coupled with surprising behavior in gcc and should not be fixed. Any time you specify the "-o" option the next argument really ought to be the output file. What does it use as the output file in the "gcc -o test.c" case, "a.out"?

On my laptop with Apple's version of gcc I get a sensible error about "no input files" when I try the "gcc -o test.c" case.

-Dave