3 Assembler Driver

The name of the command-line driver used by the MPLAB XC8 PIC Assembler is pic-as.

This driver can be invoked to perform both assembly and link steps and is the application called by development environments, such as the MPLAB X IDE, to build assembly projects.

The pic-as driver has the following basic command format:

pic-as [options] files [libraries]

Throughout this manual, it is assumed that the assembler applications are in your console’s search path or that the full path is specified when executing the application.

It is customary to declare options (identified by a leading dash “-” or double dash “--”) before the files’ names; however, this is not mandatory.

The formats of the options are supplied in Assembler Option Descriptions along with corresponding descriptions of the options' function.

The files can be an assortment of assembler source files and precompiled intermediate files. While the order in which these files are listed is not important, it can affect the allocation of code or data and can affect the names of some of the output files.

The libraries is a list of user-defined library files that will be searched by the assembler. The order of these files will determine the order in which they are searched. It is customary to insert the libraries after the list of source files; however, this is not mandatory.