GCC fatal error: stdio.h: No such file or directory

Question

I'm trying to compile a program in C on OS X 10.9 with GCC 4.9 (experimental). For some reason, I'm getting the following error at compile time:

gcc: fatal error: stdio.h: No such file or directory

I then tried a simple Hello World program:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, const char *argv[])
{
    printf("Hello, world!");
    return 0;
}

Again, upon running gcc -o ~/hello ~/hello.c, I got the same error. I'm using an experimental version of gcc, but it seems implausible that there would be a release which generated errors upon importing stdio. What could be causing this issue, and how can it be fixed?

You can see where gcc is looking for header files by doing echo "#include <bogus.h>" | gcc -v -x c - and examining the search paths. — Christian Ternus
Very useful command! It doesn't look like stdio.h is in any of GCC's search paths. — Jules
Mavericks no longer has a base /usr/include. You need to link it into place from the XCode OS 10.9 SDK. — Yann Ramin
BTW, int main's first parameter is an int and not int *argc. — p0lAris
@user2615799 Its at sudo ln -s /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.9.sdk/usr/include /usr/include — Yann Ramin

amos amos · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-22T16:55:46

Mac OS X

I had this problem too (encountered through Macports compilers). Previous versions of Xcode would let you install command line tools through xcode/Preferences, but xcode5 doesn't give a command line tools option in the GUI, that so I assumed it was automatically included now. Try running this command:

xcode-select --install

Ubuntu

(as per this answer)

sudo apt-get install libc6-dev

Alpine Linux

(as per this comment)

apk add libc-dev

GCC fatal error: stdio.h: No such file or directory

5 Answers

Mac OS X

Ubuntu

Alpine Linux

Mac OS Mojave

Update 12/2019