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I have a C project that produces ten executables, all of which I would like to be linked in statically. The problem I am facing is that one of these executables uses a 3rd-party library of which only the shared-object version is available.

If I pass the -static flag to gcc, ld will error saying it can't find the library in question (I presume it's looking for the .a version) and the executable will not be built. Ideally, I would like to be able to tell 'ld' to statically link as much as it can and fail over to the shared object library if a static library cannot be found.

In the interium I tried something like gcc -static -lib1 -lib2 -shared -lib3rdparty foo.c -o foo.exe in hopes that 'ld' would statically link in lib1 and lib2 but only have a run-time dependence on lib3rdparty. Unfortunatly, this did not work as I intended; instead the -shared flag overwrote the -static flag and everything was compiled as shared-objects.

Is statically linking an all-or-nothing deal, or is there some way I can mix and match?

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Looking at this thread you can see that it can be done. The guys at GNU suggest

gcc foo.c -Wl,-Bstatic -lbar -lbaz -lqux -Wl,-Bdynamic -lcorge -o foo.exe
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3 Comments

Is there a missing "-l" prefix on the list of libs following "-Wl,-Bstatic <list of libs>; should it be: -Wl,-Bstatic -llib2 -llib2 -llib3 ???
@HestonT.Holtmann It's implied, but I'll fix it up so it's clearer.
@Anthony How to do the same with LDFLAGS ?

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