Can someone tell me what the deal is with structure padding?

Does it apply to structures when they are DEFINED or when they are USED?

ie if I define a struct fred { char x; int y; }; and then do a #pragma
pack(1) (previously was pack(4)), and then declare a variable
x, ie struct fred x;, does x come out 5 or 8?

My experimentation with Watcom says that it is the *structure definition*
not the variable, that gets defined with the appropriate packing.

I was wondering whether this was universal?

Is it true that gcc under Linux has no compile-time option to pack
structures, same as EMX for OS/2?

BFN.  Paul.
@EOT:

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