linker - Telling gcc directly to link a library statically

Question

It feels strange to me to use -Wl,-Bstatic in order to tell gcc which libraries I want to link with statically. After all I'm telling gcc directly all other information about linking with libraries (-Ldir, -llibname).

Is it possible to tell the gcc driver directly which libraries should be linked statically?

Clarification: I know that if a certain library exists only in static versions it'll use it without -Wl,-Bstatic, but I want to imply gcc to prefer the static library. I also know that specifying the library file directly would link with it, but I prefer to keep the semantic for including static and dynamic libraries the same.

Answer 1

Use -l: instead of -l. For example -l:libXYZ.a to link with libXYZ.a. Notice the lib and .a are written out, as opposed to -lXYZ which would auto-expand to libXYZ.so/libXYZ.a.

It is an option of the GNU ld linker:

-l namespec ... If namespec is of the form :filename, ld will search the library path for a file called filename, otherwise it will search the library path for a file called libnamespec.a. ... on ELF ... systems, ld will search a directory for a library called libnamespec.so before searching for one called libnamespec.a. ... Note that this behavior does not apply to :filename, which always specifies a file called filename."

(Since binutils 2.18)

Note that this only works with the GNU linker. If your ld isn't the GNU one you're out of luck.