editing the source code

Unix has at least four different text editors. The most convenient one is emacs. Emacs is extremely powerful, it has nice features like which help programming a lot. If you don't know emacs yet, it might be a good idea to learn it. Emacs has a built in tutorial. Experienced users spend most of their time in emacs (even for email, unix shell commands, etc.)

Alternative editors are vi, which takes some time getting used to, and textedit - a very simple editor. The editor pico might be a good choice for people new to unix, it's very similar to the editing mode of the email program pine.

You can start emacs as follows:

compiling and running your program

You should try out one of the example programs, let's say the hello-world program. Here's a step by step explanation of how to compile the program:

some more details

Actually, gcc does multiple steps to create an executable from your source code. At first, your program was compiled into object code, then your code is linked to the libraries in order to create an executable. You can control these these steps separately:

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