Compilation steps of a C program

There are four steps

1. Preprocessing
2. Compilation
3. Assembling
4. Linker

STEPS	INPUT	OUTPUT	GCC
Pre Processing	source file	preprocessed output (removing all # defines & replacing macros)	gcc -E a.c output will be printed in console where we can see all the Macro are replaced.
Compilation	Preprocessed output file	Assembly language code	gcc -S a.c output will be in a.s file
Assembling	Assembly code	Machine code	gcc -c a.c output will be in a.o
Linker	Machine code	executable file	gcc a.c output will be a.out file