gcc: error trying to exec 'cc1plus' : execvp: No such file or directory

I'm a newbie but adventuresome. I'm tri-booting Windows, Fedora, and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (all 64). Learning but not using dpkg, apt, and apt-get. Starting to study C++ using Ubuntu (the only one with gcc installed). So on my first attempted compile I ran the command gcc xy.cc and got the following:

gcc: error trying to exec 'cc1plus' : execvp: No such file or directory

So I searched my computer for cc1plus and execvp. And found neither. Just execvp.3.gz in directory /user/share/man/man3 and cc1 in /user/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.8.

So a whole bunch of work and learning about the package getters and checkers, but no courage to remove and reinstall etc.

Do you have some suggestions?

You're possibly missing g++ package on your machine. Open a terminal and install it using the below command:

sudo apt-get install g++

To compile using g++ use this

g++ -o test.o test.cpp

g++ can be used to compile C++ source, the default ubuntu installation comes with gcc, but not with g++.

You are trying to compile C++ source using a C compiler. gcc usually successfully compiles C++ code but by default it doesn't link any c++ specific libraries (refer to this answer on Stack Overflow).

If a message displays like : Couldn't find package ..., then try the following commands

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

then

sudo apt-get install g++

cc1plus is the c++ backend (real compiler) for gcc, if you are primarily going to program in c++ you will really want to install g++ (will have cc1plus with it). Using one the package system front ends apt-get, synaptic, software manager, or a number of others it will install the dependencies with it.

execvp is a programming function, the file you found matching it is the man (manual) page for it. to view it open a terminal and type man execvp. The man pages are often times online, and they have a TON of info in them on cli and programming stuff.