GCC not added to system path on pacman install

Question

Issue

When installing mingw on a fresh MSYS2 instance I run into the issue of gcc not found:

$ g++
bash: g++: command not found

Setup

Fresh MSYS2 install on relatively clean windows 10 install:

pacman -Syu 
pacman -Su 
pacman -S make 
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc 

Diagnostics

It appears that GCC is successfully installed into the directory /mingw64/bin

Yet my path consists of

/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/opt/bin:/c/Windows/System32:/c/Windows:/c/Windows/System32/Wbem:/c/Windows/System32/WindowsPowerShell/v1.0/:/usr/bin/site_perl:/usr/bin/vendor_perl:/usr/bin/core_perl:

As such gcc is not found.

I have tried adding /mingw64/bin to the $PATH however this seems like a temporary fix of an underlying problem.

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My question specifically is, is there any reason as to why either the mingw is not installed into the /usr/bin/ directory or the installation did not add itself to the path, and or any simple reason as to what is causing this.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Since you installed mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc it seems like you want to compile 64-bit native Windows applications. Therefore, you should start MSYS2 by running mingw64.exe, found at the top level of your MSYS2 installation. That will put /mingw64/bin/ on your PATH and set some other useful environment variables.

Answer 2

Solution

I have found simply adding C:\msys64\mingw64\bin to the host windows computers PATH variable this, in turn, adds \mingw64\bin to the MSYS2 $PATH solving the problem.