Compiling GMime Applications on UNIX

To compile a GMime application, you need to tell the compiler where to find the GMime header files and libraries. This is done with the pkg-config utility.

The following interactive shell session demonstrates how pkg-config is used:

$ pkg-config --cflags gmime-2.4
 -I/usr/include/gmime-2.4 -I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/glib-2.0/include 
$ pkg-config --libs gmime-2.4
 -L/opt/gnome2/lib -lgmime-2.4 -lnsl -lgobject-2.0 -lglib-2.0

The simplest way to compile a program is to use the "backticks" feature of the shell. If you enclose a command in backticks (not single quotes), then its output will be substituted into the command line before execution. So to compile a GTK+ Hello, World, you would type the following:

$ cc `pkg-config --cflags --libs gmime-2.4` hello.c -o hello