Where is the C Compiler?

[Alfred Vahau]

baza wrote:

> Daniel Taylor wrote:
>
>> Hey,
>>
>> This is a slightly off topic question,
>>
>> How was gcc complied before gcc was compiled in order for it to be 
>> able to compile gcc? if you understand my chicken vs egg logic.
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> - Daniel
>>
> If I have it right Richard Stallman coded it so there would be a 
> 'free' compiler. It was thought to be an important milestone for the 
> GNU project to have a C compiler.
>
> Baza
>
As a newbie to Debian and in this case Ubuntu, I'd like to thank the 
people for initiating me into Debian and its powerful apt-get command. 
This pointer is sufficient for me to continue on with my project.
It will be seen from my initial posting that I mention the 'which' and 
the 'find' commands - the two commands that Unix users issue to locate 
the path of a command. In my case, I wanted to know where cc or gcc were 
located.

Neither of these were on the standard path as which cc or which gcc 
returned zero results.
But which perl for instance returned /usr/bin/perl so I know that perl 
is o.k as I will need Perl.

This was strange to me as both cc and gcc are essential commands for 
working in a Unix/Linux environment.
I downloaded the gcc package from a GNU mirror site and proceeded to 
install following the familiar steps.
gunzip, tar, configure, make and make install

The installation failed because the Makefile was looking for the path to 
the cc command to compile gcc.
I also made similar attempts to install apache from source which also 
failed since the path to a cc compiler could not be found.

Puzzled, I decided to post reasoning that maybe in Debian things are 
done differently. I now know that apt-get is the one command that I must 
get used to.

Alfred,