The objective of this tutorial is to install GCC, the C compiler, on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish.
GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection is a compiler system developed to support various programming languages. It is a standard compiler used in most projects related to GNU and Linux, for example, the Linux kernel.
Installation of GCC can be achieved by using the apt install
command as you will see below.
In this tutorial you will learn:
- How to install GCC compiler
- How to Check C compiler version
- How to Compile basic C program from source code
- How to run C program

Category | Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used |
---|---|
System | Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish |
Software | GCC |
Other | Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command. |
Conventions |
# – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command$ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user |
Install GCC the C compiler on Ubuntu 22.04 step by step instructions
Although you can install the C compiler separately by installation of the
gcc
package, the recommended way to install the C compiler on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish is by installation of the entire development package build-essential
.
- Open a command line terminal and install C compiler by installation of the development package
build-essential
:$ sudo apt update $ sudo apt install build-essential
DO YOU NEED MULTIPLE C AND/OR C++ COMPILER VERSIONS?
Visit our other tutorial on How to switch between multiple GCC and G++ compiler versions on Ubuntu 22.04 to see how to install multiple compiler versions on the same Ubuntu system. - Check C compiler version to verify a successful installation:
$ gcc --version
- We can verify that our GCC compiler works by creating a basic C code source. For example let’s create a hello world C program. Save the following code as
hello.c
text file:#include <stdio.h> int main() { printf("Hello, World!"); return 0; }
- Compile and execute the
hello.c
C code:$ gcc -o hello hello.c $ ./hello Hello, World!
Closing Thoughts
In this tutorial, we saw how to install GCC, the very simple C compiler on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish. We also learned how to create a simple Hello World C program in order to test the new compiler.