I am learning C from a book. The book mentioned archive files:
An archive contains .o files Ever used a .zip or a .tar file? Then you know how easy it is to create a file that contains other files. That’s exactly what a .a archive file is: a file containing other files. Open up a terminal or a command prompt and change into one of the library directories. These are the directories like /usr/lib or C:\MinGW\lib that contain the library code. In a library directory, you’ll find a whole bunch of .a archives. And there’s a command called nm that you can use to look inside them.
However When I looked up the lib location(on Ubuntu) that book says, didn't find archive files. How can I see these archive files?
The location of system libraries could change slightly across different distributions. On Ubuntu, you can find the static libraries in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu and /usr/lib32 for 64-bit and 32-bit respectively (This is, in fact, slightly different in older Ubuntu distros. But on recent distros (>Ubuntu 12), this has been consistent).