How to compile .c file with OpenSSL includes?

Your include paths indicate that you should be compiling against the system's OpenSSL installation. You shouldn't have the .h files in your package directory - it should be picking them up from /usr/include/openssl.

The plain OpenSSL package (libssl) doesn't include the .h files - you need to install the development package as well. This is named libssl-dev on Debian, Ubuntu and similar distributions, and libssl-devel on CentOS, Fedora, Red Hat and similar.


Use the -I flag to gcc properly.

gcc -I/path/to/openssl/ -o Opentest -lcrypto Opentest.c

The -I should point to the directory containing the openssl folder.


Use the snippet below as a solution for the cited challenge;

yum install openssl
yum install openssl-devel

Tested and proved effective on CentOS version 5.4 with keepalived version 1.2.7.


You need to include the library path (-L/usr/local/lib/)

gcc -o Opentest Opentest.c -L/usr/local/lib/ -lssl -lcrypto

It works for me.


If the OpenSSL headers are in the openssl sub-directory of the current directory, use:

gcc -I. -o Opentest Opentest.c -lcrypto

The pre-processor looks to create a name such as "./openssl/ssl.h" from the "." in the -I option and the name specified in angle brackets. If you had specified the names in double quotes (#include "openssl/ssl.h"), you might never have needed to ask the question; the compiler on Unix usually searches for headers enclosed in double quotes in the current directory automatically, but it does not do so for headers enclosed in angle brackets (#include <openssl/ssl.h>). It is implementation defined behaviour.

You don't say where the OpenSSL libraries are - you might need to add an appropriate option and argument to specify that, such as '-L /opt/openssl/lib'.