Preprocessor output

Question

How do I view the output produced by the C pre-processor, prior to its conversion into an object file?

I want to see what the MACRO definitions do to my code.

Answer 1

It depends on the compiler you use.
With GCC, you can specify the -E flag on the command-line to let the compiler produce the pre-processor output.

Answer 2

gcc -E file.c

or

g++ -E file.cpp

will do this for you. The -E switch forces the compiler to stop after the preprocessing phase, spitting all it’s got at the moment to standard output.

Note: Surely you must have some #include directives. The included files get preprocessed, too, so you might get lots of output.

For Visual C++ the switch is /E which spits the preprocessor output to screen.