I am trying to understand the compiling process. We can see the preprocessor intermediate file by using:
gcc -E hello.c -o hello.i
or
cpp hello.c > hello.i
I roughly know what the preprocessor does, but I have difficulties understanding the numbers in some of the lines. For example:
# 1 "/usr/include/stdc-predef.h" 1 3 4
# 1 "<command-line>" 2
# 1 "hello.c"
# 1 "/usr/include/stdio.h" 1 3 4
# 27 "/usr/include/stdio.h" 3 4
# 1 "/usr/include/features.h" 1 3 4
# 374 "/usr/include/features.h" 3 4
The numbers can help debugger to display the line numbers. So my guess for the first column is the line number for column #2 file. But what do the following numbers do?
The numbers following the filename are flags:
1: This indicates the start of a new file.
2: This indicates returning to a file (after having included another file).
3: This indicates that the following text comes from a system header file, so certain warnings should be suppressed.
4: This indicates that the following text should be treated as being wrapped in an implicit
extern "C"
block.Source: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/cpp/Preprocessor-Output.html