C++, the “Old Fashioned” way

Question

I have been learning C++ in school to create small command-line programs.

However, I have only built my projects with IDEs, including VS08 and QtCreator.

I under

Answer 1

A simple example is often useful to show the basic procedure, so:

Sample gcc usage to compile C++ files:

$ g++ -c file1.cpp                 # compile object files
[...]
$ g++ -c file2.cpp
[...]
$ g++ -o program file1.o file2.o   # link program
[...]
$ ./program                        # run program

To use make to do this build, the following Makefile could be used:

# main target, with dependencies, followed by build command (indented with )
program: file1.o file2.o
    g++ -o program file1.o file2.o

# rules for object files, with dependencies and build commands
file1.o: file1.cpp file1.h
    g++ -c file1.cpp

file2.o: file2.cpp file2.h file1.h
    g++ -c file2.cpp

Sample Makefile usage:

$ make                              # build it
[...]
$ ./program                         # run it

For all the details you can look at the Gnu make manual and GCC's documentation.