If you have a single foo.c, see if make can compile it for you:

make foo

No makefiles or anything needed.

Fabrice Bellard's TCC seems to be still in the repositories. It can run in a kind of interpreter-mode which makes the following possible:

You can make a simple C-file executable like the OP tried to do by adding the line

#!/usr/bin/tcc -run

to the very top of the file.

It also accepts input from STDIN by adding an empty option (just the minus sign -) at the end.

$ /usr/bin/tcc -run - <<EOF
> #include <stdio.h>
> int main()
> {
>    printf("Hello World\n");
>    return 0;
> }
> EOF
Hello World

or with echo

echo '#include <stdio.h> int main(){printf("Hello World\n");return 0;}' | /usr/bin/tcc -run -

or just run /usr/bin/tcc -run - type your code and start the run with CTRL + D

Seems useless and silly but the last method is the fastest (for me, YMMV etc.) to check for a function in a large library, look up the exact value of a constant etc. And it is small (180k) which makes it a good fit for e.g. the Raspberry-Pi.

Main disadvantage: development stopped (last version is from 2013).

You're trying to run the wrong file. The compiler wrote your program to filename, but all error messages look as if you were trying to run the source code, filename.c, directly.

(Make sure you've ran the compiler correctly; too – it's gcc -o, not gcc o-.)