John Maddock wrote: <snip>

The g++ linker is pretty brain-dead - the libraries have to appear on the command line *after* the source files that use them.

This is not brain-dead. It is useful to be able to control the order in which symbols are looked for since they may be defined in more than one library. It is a bit weird that -l is not placed before the file names as is the Unix convention for options, but it *isn't* an option - it is a shortcut for specifying a file in the library search path that follows the usual library name convention (lib<name>.a) and is exactly equivalent to specifying the full file name (AFAIK). Secondly, there is no g++ linker. g++ can use various Unix linkers though it is most commonly used together with the linker from GNU binutils. However, all Unix linkers should behave this way. Ben.