Re: about the symbol ">"

[Paul D. Smith]

%% Yonghai Zhang <address@hidden> writes:

  yz> I am a student at the univrsity Karlsruh in Germany and I am reading now
  yz> the GNU-make over the internet. I found that there is no explanation or
  yz> reference to the symbol ">" in the file and this prevents me from
  yz> further reading. Could you please show me something about that?

You'll have to give some information about what exactly you're looking
at.  Are you looking at the code for make?  Then you should read a book
on C to see what ">" means.

Are you looking at makefiles, and you see ">" in them?  Make doesn't
treat ">" as a special character (except for the variable $>, which you
can read about in the GNU make manual, see "Automatic Variables").  The
only other place ">" is meaningful is in the commands make runs, and
make invokes the shell to run those commands, so ">" is a shell
operator; you should read a book on the shell, or the sh man page or
something like that.


HTH...

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 Paul D. Smith <address@hidden>          Find some GNU make tips at:
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