OS X Mountain Lion: gcc-4.2 No such file or directory

Question

Tried to install a gem on Mountain Lion and make couldn\'t find gcc-4.2:

kamil$ gem install posix-spawn -v \'0.3.6\'
Building native extensions.  This could          


        

Answer 1

If you have Xcode installed, gcc should be available. Check where it is with:

kamil$ which gcc
/usr/bin/gcc

Then make a user-land symbolic link from gcc-4.2 to plain gcc:

kamil$ sudo ln -s ~/bin/gcc /usr/bin/gcc-4.2

(Ensure the user-land bind folder is in your path via export PATH=...:$HOME/bin in your .bash_profile or .zshrc.)

Gem installed fine afterwards.

Answer 2

As @Artur Bodera mentioned modern OSX will refuse to let you create the symlink in the systems /bin folder.

To avoid this simply create the symlink to your users bin folder

ln -s ~/bin/gcc /usr/bin/gcc-4.2

Don't forget to add the bin folder to your .zshrc or .bash_profile - e.g.

export PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:$HOME/bin

Answer 3

I had a similar issue while installing a python pip package (building a wheel failed). I got the similar message:

unable to execute '/usr/bin/gcc-4.2': No such file or directory
  error: command '/usr/bin/gcc-4.2' failed with exit status 1

Linking /usr/bin/gcc-4.2 to /usr/bin/gcc was not possible due to Apples System Integrity Protection (SIP), and linking it to /usr/local/bin/gcc-4.2 was not picked up by the wheel building process; it was still trying to use /usr/bin/gcc-4.2.

I was finally able to solve this by setting the CC variable in the terminal:

CC=/usr/bin/gcc
# Install your packages
pip install -r requirements.txt

PS : note that disabling SIP doesn't work, even with SIP disabled I wasn't able to create the /usr/bin/gcc-4.2 link.

Answer 4

Install simply apple-gcc42 with brew. It generate gcc-4.2 .

brew install apple-gcc42

So we do not need symlinks, which apple update may remove.

Homebrew