how to find gcc version on mac

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I am using OS 10.9 on mac machine. I want to know the version of gcc I am using. So I tried gcc --version on terminal and it results :

$ gcc --version
Configured with: --prefix=/Applications/Xcode5-DP.app/Contents/Developer/usr --with-gxx-include-dir=/Applications/Xcode5-DP.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.9.sdk/usr/include/c++/4.2.1
Apple LLVM version 5.0 (clang-500.1.58) (based on LLVM 3.3svn)
Target: x86_64-apple-darwin13.0.0
Thread model: posix

Here in output, there is no detail related to gcc but clang is there. I am confused whether gcc command executes clang or gcc(gnu).

5 Answers

You seem to not actually have gcc on your path. As of recent versions of Xcode, it installs a "gcc" that is instead a link to Clang.

The tools supplied by Apple have been switched from GCC to Clang. The gcc command is linked to clang as a convenience. In OS X 10.9, you do not have GCC on your system unless you have installed it independently of Apple packages.

In case you installed gcc via brew install, it might've got installed as gcc-11.

You can run brew info gcc to get path where it is installed and get exact name of the binary by listing the directory.

$ brew info gcc
gcc: stable 11.2.0 (bottled), HEAD
GNU compiler collection
https://gcc.gnu.org/
/usr/local/Cellar/gcc/11.2.0_3 (2,163 files, 459.8MB) *
...
$ ls /usr/local/Cellar/gcc/11.2.0_3/bin
c++-11                  gcc-ar-11               gcov-dump-11                gfortran                x86_64-apple-darwin21-g++-11        x86_64-apple-darwin21-gcc-ranlib-11
cpp-11                  gcc-nm-11               gcov-tool-11                gfortran-11             x86_64-apple-darwin21-gcc-11        x86_64-apple-darwin21-gcc-tmp
g++-11                  gcc-ranlib-11               gdc                 lto-dump-11             x86_64-apple-darwin21-gcc-ar-11     x86_64-apple-darwin21-gdc-11
gcc-11                  gcov-11                 gdc-11                  x86_64-apple-darwin21-c++-11        x86_64-apple-darwin21-gcc-nm-11     x86_64-apple-darwin21-gfortran-11

Then using gcc-11 -v will get you actual version of gcc installed.

$ gcc-11 -v
Using built-in specs.
COLLECT_GCC=gcc-11
COLLECT_LTO_WRAPPER=/usr/local/Cellar/gcc/11.2.0_3/bin/../libexec/gcc/x86_64-apple-darwin21/11/lto-wrapper
Target: x86_64-apple-darwin21
Configured with: ../configure --prefix=/usr/local/opt/gcc --libdir=/usr/local/opt/gcc/lib/gcc/11 --disable-nls --enable-checking=release --with-gcc-major-version-only --enable-languages=c,c++,objc,obj-c++,fortran,d --program-suffix=-11 --with-gmp=/usr/local/opt/gmp --with-mpfr=/usr/local/opt/mpfr --with-mpc=/usr/local/opt/libmpc --with-isl=/usr/local/opt/isl --with-zstd=/usr/local/opt/zstd --with-pkgversion='Homebrew GCC 11.2.0_3' --with-bugurl=https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/issues --enable-libphobos --build=x86_64-apple-darwin21 --with-system-zlib --disable-multilib --with-native-system-header-dir=/usr/include --with-sysroot=/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX12.sdk
Thread model: posix
Supported LTO compression algorithms: zlib zstd
gcc version 11.2.0 (Homebrew GCC 11.2.0_3) 
gcc -dumpversion | cut -f1 -f2 -f3 -d.
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