how does Make process command sections before passing to the shell

[Andrew Ferguson]

hi,

 

 I have a question that I was hoping someone could answer. I am trying to understand which characters have special significance in a rule command section and which participants are involved in processing them.

 

For example, given

 

    target: dep1.ext dep2.ext dep3.ext

        command --opt1 val1 etc..

 

how can you predicate which characters will be given special significance? It seems the section of text after the rule header is processed by make itself before being passed to the underlying shell?

 

At the moment, I'm aware that the following may do some textual processing before passing the commands on to the next layer

    (1) Make

    (2) A shell (or can tools sometimes be invoked direct by OS process creation api?)

    (3) The tool itself

 

any help appreciated,

thanks,

Andrew

 

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