I installed gcc with the GUI installer MinGW Installation Manager. After it installed the basics, I manually checked and installed mingw32-binutils and mingw32-gcc. I added the directory to my path. I can use the command in powershell. If I use gcc alone I get an error because i didn't input any file, if I put in a .txt it tells me it's not recognized. So that part works as it should.
However once I put a file, main.c, whether or not it's real code (basic main with hello world) or a random string or character, absolutely nothing happens, no message, and the command terminates. So basically I enter gcc and the prompt immediately asks for another command. I reinstalled it twice.
The command:
gcc -o a.exe main.c
I'm using Windows 10 if that can help.
There are other things to install. See the list that you can find in the MinGW site :
binutils (bin)
mingw-runtime (dev and dll)
w32api
Required runtime libraries for GCC:
mpc (dll)
mpfr (dll)
gmp (dll)
pthreads (dev and dll)
iconv (dll)
zlib
gettext
gcc-core (bin and dev and dll)
Otherwise, you can install all the required packages via the GUI manager provided with the installation of MinGW.