4.4. Help and verbosity options

––help, -?

Cause GHC to spew a long usage message to standard output and then exit.

-v

The -v option makes GHC verbose: it reports its version number and shows (on stderr) exactly how it invokes each phase of the compilation system. Moreover, it passes the -v flag to most phases; each reports its version number (and possibly some other information).

Please, oh please, use the -v option when reporting bugs! Knowing that you ran the right bits in the right order is always the first thing we want to verify.

-vn

To provide more control over the compiler's verbosity, the -v flag takes an optional numeric argument. Specifying -v on its own is equivalent to -v3, and the other levels have the following meanings:

––version

Print a one-line string including GHC's version number.

––numeric-version

Print GHC's numeric version number only.

––print-libdir

Print the path to GHC's library directory. This is the top of the directory tree containing GHC's libraries, interfaces, and include files (usually something like /usr/local/lib/ghc-5.04 on Unix). This is the value of $libdirin the package configuration file (see Section 4.10).