[linux-help] interchanging executables

[John Reinke <jmreinke@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I had someone tell me recently that if a program is compiled correctly, it
can be run on that hardware, regardless of the operating system. Is this
true? I can understand this would be true for operating systems
themselves, but I would think that executables are being managed by an
operating system as processes, and somehow need to be able to know how
they will be controlled.

For example, assume I wrote a C program that looks for a text string
within all the files of a directory (including subdirectories), and
creates a file with the output. Let's say I compiled it on a 300 MHz
Pentium system running Debian Linux. So, assumming I compiled it in the
correct manner, I could also use that executable in OS/2, BeOS,
Windoze95/98/2000/NT, other UNIX/Linux distributions or ANY other
operating system that can run on the same hardware? If so, could it also
work on all x86 and compatible processors?

I would think that working with the different file systems would add to
the problem, unless there is a universal way executables communicate to
operating systems that they need to change into a directory or create a
file, etc.

John


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