Steps for GCC version 7.3.0 Install on CentOS 7

Installing GCC on CentOS 7, is really an easy task and it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes.

1. Update the server

First of all log in to your CentOS 7 VPS via SSH as user root

ssh root@IP_Address -p Port_number

and make sure that all installed packages on the server are up to date

yum -y update

2. Install GCC from repository

GCC can be easily installed from the official CentOS repositories. Run the following command to install GCC on your server

yum -y install gcc

Once the installation is completed, you can the version of GCC installed on your server

gcc --version

gcc (GCC) 4.8.5 20150623 (Red Hat 4.8.5-16)
Copyright (C) 2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

As might be seen from the output, the GCC version distributed by CentOS 7 is 4.8.5 which is not the latest version of GCC.

You may also want to install gcc-c++. It will automatically include the C++ library and compile files with extensions that indicate they are C source as C++, instead of as C.

yum -y install gcc-c++

3. Install GCC from source

If you need a newer version of GCC than the one distributed by the official CentOS 7 repositories you can install it from source.

It is highly recommended to start a screen session before starting the installation. Run the following command

screen -U -S gcc

Download the tarball of the GCC version you want to install. In our example we will use GCC version 7.3.0

wget http://ftp.mirrorservice.org/sites/sourceware.org/pub/gcc/releases/gcc-7.3.0/gcc-7.3.0.tar.gz

Unpack the tar archive and change the current working directory

tar zxf gcc-7.3.0.tar.gz
cd gcc-7.3.0

Install bzip2 and run the ‘download_prerequisites’ script to download some prerequisites needed by GCC. You have to run this from the top level of the GCC source tree.

yum -y install bzip2
./contrib/download_prerequisites

Once the prerequisites are downloaded execute the following command to start configuring the GCC build environment

./configure --disable-multilib --enable-languages=c,c++

Once it is completed, run the following command to compile the source code. It may take a few hours for the compilation to complete, so sit back and relax.

make -j 4
make install

4. Verify GCC installation on CentOS 7

After the compilation process is completed. You can check if GCC is properly installed.

gcc --version

gcc (GCC) 7.3.0
Copyright (C) 2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Done.