a C fille including a header file that in turn includes another header file

[vigalchin]

Ironically I am not a newbie but slightly fuzzy memory. I am trying to punch my way out of a wet paper bag

Ok ....

- I have two directories .. say dirA and dirB.

- dirA contains my C bozo.c file along with an include file (also in dirA) donbass.h. "donbass.h" includes an iinclude file "donesk.h" from dirB.

- for now I am using command line (bash shell) complilation

gcc -I. - IdirB -c bozo.c

The gcc compiler can't find ditrB/"dobass.h" ... Why? (Should be easy peesy")


BTW I using Ubuntu 18.04 and gcc 7.3.0.

Vasily

[spjackson]

I am afraid that is all very confusing... which may explain why nobody has tried to help yet.

- I have two directories .. say dirA and dirB.

- dirA contains my C bozo.c file along with an include file (also in dirA) donbass.h. "donbass.h" includes an iinclude file "donesk.h" from dirB.

- for now I am using command line (bash shell) complilation

gcc -I. - IdirB -c bozo.c

So far so good... (except for the space between the - and IdirB but I'll assume that's a typo).

The gcc compiler can't find ditrB/"dobass.h" ... Why?

You haven't mentioned ditrB before, is it a typo for dirB?
You haven't mentioned dobass.h before, is it a typo for donbass.h?
But you said that donbass.h is in dirA, so I'm confused.
gcc will not (cannot) show the relative directory name for a header it cannot find unless that relative directory is specified in the #include directive e.g.

#include "ditrB/dobass.h"

If you are doing that, you need -I for the parent directory of ditrB.

It would help if you could show all relevant #include directives, without typos, and the verbatim compiler output.

Is dirB a sub-directory of dirA or are you correctly using the relative path? e.g.

gcc -I. -I../path/to/dirB -c bozo.c

[TheFu]

Assuming ...

$ tree -d proj
proj
├── bin
├── contrib
├── doc
├── include
│** ├── dirA
│** └── dirB
├── lib
├── share
└── src

If it were me, I'd use -I include/ and assume the PWD was the project top and let the makefile determine the real top directory at build time. Then inside my code, the headers would be

#include "dirA/donbass.h" 
#include "dirB/donesk.h"

But that's me. Lots of reasons for this, but non-professionals are usually struggling with other coding issues so making a great makefile/Cmakefile that does lots and lots of things automatically isn't normal.