Programming

A good day to you, dear experts,

I am a newbie, I noticed in binutils or gcc there are lib and lib32 and lib64, to take binutils as an example,
My system is sgi IRIX6.5, which is suggested to use "n32" flag during the compiling and linking, is that mean that I need to use lib32?
Q1. which one should I use, lib or lib32 or both?
Q2. If it is lib32 that I have to link to, then how can I set it?
Q3. Do I need to do something after installing binutils, I mean what shall I do after "./configure --prefix=***; make; make install;", do I need to copy some special libraries for binutils and gcc?

Any help much appreciated!

Daniel

i'm not a programmer. never was! buuuuuuuut
whenever i compile from source (being an already made pile of code) i usually see what time of library files they want. 32 or 64. take for example mysql. you can compile both 32bit or 64bit versions. it depends on your system architecture obviously and what compilers you have installed. therefore, when i go to compile, i make sure my ld_library_path is pointing to the 64 or 32bit library files (depending on what i want to compile).

and as for ./configure --prefix=*** it is up to you. if you feel you want libraries placed in prefix/lib and executables in prefix/bin then do that. i believe /usr/local is the default prefix.

Probably try lib first. On my 64-bit system, lib is a symlink to lib64 (or was it the other way around) and lib32 is for non-native 32-bit stuff (like proprietary drivers and codecs which only exist in i386 binary form and can't be recompiled for 64-bit).