Using G++ to compile multiple .cpp and .h files

Question

I\'ve just inherited some C++ code that was written poorly with one cpp file which contained the main and a bunch of other functions. There are also .h files th

Answer 1

Now that I've separated the classes to .h and .cpp files do I need to use a makefile or can I still use the "g++ main.cpp" command?

Compiling several files at once is a poor choice if you are going to put that into the Makefile.

Normally in a Makefile (for GNU/Make), it should suffice to write that:

# "all" is the name of the default target, running "make" without params would use it
all: executable1

# for C++, replace CC (c compiler) with CXX (c++ compiler) which is used as default linker
CC=$(CXX)

# tell which files should be used, .cpp -> .o make would do automatically
executable1: file1.o file2.o

That way make would be properly recompiling only what needs to be recompiled. One can also add few tweaks to generate the header file dependencies - so that make would also properly rebuild what's need to be rebuilt due to the header file changes.