How can I run GCC into WSL?

Question

So, Windows System on Linux seems to be an inovative light-weight substitute for a virtual machine, especially when it comes to learning Linux. Nevertheless, for me WSL seems to have a little more complicated organization from a VM when it comes to file management. For example, in WSL the data are stored in

C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Packages\CanonicalGroupLimited.Ubuntu20.04onWindows_79rhkp1fndgsc\LocalState\rootfs\usr\

as shown here. Of course my first try to install GCC was to type in:

sudo apt install gcc

,but after typing

gcc --version

the output was :

Command 'gcc' not found, but can be installed with:

sudo apt install gcc

After that, I tried installing GCC using the following commands as shown here :

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y
$ sudo apt autoremove -y
$ sudo apt-get install gcc -y

but I end up getting the same output. On the other hand, I already had installed TDM GCC on Windows and used sudo in VM to install it also there (successfully:). Like a lot of people, I want to substitute the use of my virtual machine with WSL in order to be able to develop in C without overloading my RAM my questions are :

Can you count out for me how many times have I downloaded GCC files?

Why the folder that I was supposed to be downloading the gcc files in is shown to be empty?

Where are the downloaded files being stored?

How can get gcc fired up?

Is there any way to use the gcc I had on Windows to compile C using the WSL terminal?

I think these questions come from the fact that I cannot understand how WSL file system interacts with Windows. They are a bit more generic on purpose because I want you to have a lot of "answering" freedom. Please help me out of this one! I don't want to be forced to use a virtual machine and run out of RAM almost every time!

How can I run GCC into WSL?

0 Answers