Compile string of C code

Question

Really off the wall question here, but is there a way to compile a string of C code in GCC without any medium to hold that string (eg. a source file)?

Something along th

Answer 1

I confess to sometimes highlighting code and using:

(cat preamble.hpp; xsel) | g++ -x c++ - && ./a.out

The same works with "-x c" for C.

Answer 2

If you use - as the input file in the command line, gcc reads from standard input. Since there is no file name extension gcc could use to find out the language that should be compiled, it has to be specified with the -x flag:

$ gcc -x c -o tst - <<EOF
> #include <stdio.h>
> int main(void) {
>   printf("Hello world\n");
> }
> EOF
$ ./tst
Hello world