GCC fatal error: stdio.h: No such file or directory

Jules picture Jules · Oct 25, 2013 · Viewed 188.9k times · Source

I'm trying to compile a program in C on OS X 10.9 with GCC 4.9 (experimental). For some reason, I'm getting the following error at compile time:

gcc: fatal error: stdio.h: No such file or directory

I then tried a simple Hello World program:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, const char *argv[])
{
    printf("Hello, world!");
    return 0;
}

Again, upon running gcc -o ~/hello ~/hello.c, I got the same error. I'm using an experimental version of gcc, but it seems implausible that there would be a release which generated errors upon importing stdio. What could be causing this issue, and how can it be fixed?

Answer

amos picture amos · Nov 22, 2013

Mac OS X

I had this problem too (encountered through Macports compilers). Previous versions of Xcode would let you install command line tools through xcode/Preferences, but xcode5 doesn't give a command line tools option in the GUI, that so I assumed it was automatically included now. Try running this command:

xcode-select --install

Ubuntu

(as per this answer)

sudo apt-get install libc6-dev

Alpine Linux

(as per this comment)

apk add libc-dev