The C Preprocessor: Richard M. Stallman, Zachary Weinberg

The C Preprocessor
For gcc version 4.4.3
(GCC)
Richard M. Stallman, Zachary Weinberg

Copyright c 1987, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001,
2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of
the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the
Free Software Foundation. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU
Free Documentation License”.
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and the Back-Cover Texts are (b) (see below).
(a) The FSF’s Front-Cover Text is:
A GNU Manual
(b) The FSF’s Back-Cover Text is:
You have freedom to copy and modify this GNU Manual, like GNU software. Copies
published by the Free Software Foundation raise funds for GNU development.
i
Table of Contents
1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1 Character sets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Initial processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.3 Tokenization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.4 The preprocessing language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2 Header Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.1 Include Syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.2 Include Operation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.3 Search Path . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.4 Once-Only Headers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.5 Alternatives to Wrapper #ifndef . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.6 Computed Includes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.7 Wrapper Headers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.8 System Headers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3 Macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.1 Object-like Macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
3.2 Function-like Macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
3.3 Macro Arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
3.4 Stringification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
3.5 Concatenation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
3.6 Variadic Macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
3.7 Predefined Macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
3.7.1 Standard Predefined Macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
3.7.2 Common Predefined Macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
3.7.3 System-specific Predefined Macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
3.7.4 C++ Named Operators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
3.8 Undefining and Redefining Macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
3.9 Directives Within Macro Arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
3.10 Macro Pitfalls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
3.10.1 Misnesting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
3.10.2 Operator Precedence Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
3.10.3 Swallowing the Semicolon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
3.10.4 Duplication of Side Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
3.10.5 Self-Referential Macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
3.10.6 Argument Prescan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
3.10.7 Newlines in Arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
ii
4 Conditionals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
4.1 Conditional Uses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
4.2 Conditional Syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
4.2.1 Ifdef . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
4.2.2 If . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
4.2.3 Defined . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
4.2.4 Else . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
4.2.5 Elif . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
4.3 Deleted Code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
5 Diagnostics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
6 Line Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
7 Pragmas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
8 Other Directives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
9 Preprocessor Output . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
10 Traditional Mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
10.1 Traditional lexical analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
10.2 Traditional macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
10.3 Traditional miscellany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
10.4 Traditional warnings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
11 Implementation Details . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
11.1 Implementation-defined behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
11.2 Implementation limits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
11.3 Obsolete Features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
11.3.1 Assertions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
11.4 Differences from previous versions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
12 Invocation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
13 Environment Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
GNU Free Documentation License . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

ADDENDUM: How to use this License for your documents . . . . . . . . . 70
Index of Directives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Option Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Concept Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Chapter 1: Overview 1
1 Overview
The C preprocessor, often known as cpp, is a macro processor that is used automatically by
the C compiler to transform your program before compilation. It is called a macro processor
because it allows you to define macros, which are brief abbreviations for longer constructs.
The C preprocessor is intended to be used only with C, C++, and Objective-C source
code. In the past, it has been abused as a general text processor. It will choke on input
which does not obey C’s lexical rules. For example, apostrophes will be interpreted as the
beginning of character constants, and cause errors. Also, you cannot rely on it preserving
characteristics of the input which are not significant to C-family languages. If a Makefile is
preprocessed, all the hard tabs will be removed, and the Makefile will not work.
Having said that, you can often get away with using cpp on things which are not C. Other
Algol-ish programming languages are often safe (Pascal, Ada, etc.) So is assembly, with
caution. ‘-traditional-cpp’ mode preserves more white space, and is otherwise more
permissive. Many of the problems can be avoided by writing C or C++ style comments
instead of native language comments, and keeping macros simple.
Wherever possible, you should use a preprocessor geared to the language you are writing
in. Modern versions of the GNU assembler have macro facilities. Most high level program-
ming languages have their own conditional compilation and inclusion mechanism. If all else
fails, try a true general text processor, such as GNU M4.
C preprocessors vary in some details. This manual discusses the GNU C preprocessor,
which provides a small superset of the features of ISO Standard C. In its default mode,
the GNU C preprocessor does not do a few things required by the standard. These are
features which are rarely, if ever, used, and may cause surprising changes to the meaning of
a program which does not expect them. To get strict ISO Standard C, you should use the
‘-std=c89’ or ‘-std=c99’ options, depending on which version of the standard you want.
To get all the mandatory diagnostics, you must also use ‘-pedantic’. See Chapter 12
[Invocation], page 52.
This manual describes the behavior of the ISO preprocessor. To minimize gratuitous
differences, where the ISO preprocessor’s behavior does not conflict with traditional seman-
tics, the traditional preprocessor should behave the same way. The various differences that
do exist are detailed in the section Chapter 10 [Traditional Mode], page 44.
For clarity, unless noted otherwise, references to ‘CPP’ in this manual refer to GNU CPP.
1.1 Character sets

Source code character set processing in C and related languages is rather complicated. The
C standard discusses two character sets, but there are really at least four.
The files input to CPP might be in any character set at all. CPP’s very first action,
before it even looks for line boundaries, is to convert the file into the character set it uses
for internal processing. That set is what the C standard calls the source character set. It
must be isomorphic with ISO 10646, also known as Unicode. CPP uses the UTF-8 encoding
of Unicode.
The character sets of the input files are specified using the ‘-finput-charset=’ option.
All preprocessing work (the subject of the rest of this manual) is carried out in the source
character set. If you request textual output from the preprocessor with the ‘-E’ option, it
will be in UTF-8.
After preprocessing is complete, string and character constants are converted again, into
the execution character set. This character set is under control of the user; the default
is UTF-8, matching the source character set. Wide string and character constants have
their own character set, which is not called out specifically in the standard. Again, it is
under control of the user. The default is UTF-16 or UTF-32, whichever fits in the target’s
wchar_t type, in the target machine’s byte order.1 Octal and hexadecimal escape sequences
do not undergo conversion; ’\x12’ has the value 0x12 regardless of the currently selected
execution character set. All other escapes are replaced by the character in the source
character set that they represent, then converted to the execution character set, just like
unescaped characters.
Unless the experimental ‘-fextended-identifiers’ option is used, GCC does not per-
mit the use of characters outside the ASCII range, nor ‘\u’ and ‘\U’ escapes, in identifiers.
Even with that option, characters outside the ASCII range can only be specified with the
‘\u’ and ‘\U’ escapes, not used directly in identifiers.
1.2 Initial processing

The preprocessor performs a series of textual transformations on its input. These happen
before all other processing. Conceptually, they happen in a rigid order, and the entire file
is run through each transformation before the next one begins. CPP actually does them
all at once, for performance reasons. These transformations correspond roughly to the first
three “phases of translation” described in the C standard.
1. The input file is read into memory and broken into lines.
Different systems use different conventions to indicate the end of a line. GCC accepts
the ASCII control sequences LF, CR LF and CR as end-of-line markers. These are the
canonical sequences used by Unix, DOS and VMS, and the classic Mac OS (before
OSX) respectively. You may therefore safely copy source code written on any of those
systems to a different one and use it without conversion. (GCC may lose track of
the current line number if a file doesn’t consistently use one convention, as sometimes
happens when it is edited on computers with different conventions that share a network
file system.)
If the last line of any input file lacks an end-of-line marker, the end of the file is
considered to implicitly supply one. The C standard says that this condition provokes
undefined behavior, so GCC will emit a warning message.
2. If trigraphs are enabled, they are replaced by their corresponding single characters. By
default GCC ignores trigraphs, but if you request a strictly conforming mode with the
‘-std’ option, or you specify the ‘-trigraphs’ option, then it converts them.
These are nine three-character sequences, all starting with ‘??’, that are defined by
ISO C to stand for single characters. They permit obsolete systems that lack some of
C’s punctuation to use C. For example, ‘??/’ stands for ‘\’, so ’??/n’ is a character
constant for a newline.
1
UTF-16 does not meet the requirements of the C standard for a wide character set, but the choice of
16-bit wchar_t is enshrined in some system ABIs so we cannot fix this.
Trigraphs are not popular and many compilers implement them incorrectly.
Portable code should not rely on trigraphs being either converted or ignored. With
‘-Wtrigraphs’ GCC will warn you when a trigraph may change the meaning of your
program if it were converted. See [Wtrigraphs], page 53.
In a string constant, you can prevent a sequence of question marks from being confused
with a trigraph by inserting a backslash between the question marks, or by separat-
ing the string literal at the trigraph and making use of string literal concatenation.
"(??\?)" is the string ‘(???)’, not ‘(?]’. Traditional C compilers do not recognize
these idioms.
The nine trigraphs and their replacements are
Trigraph: ??( ??) ??< ??> ??= ??/ ??’ ??! ??-
Replacement: [ ] { } # \ ^ | ~
3. Continued lines are merged into one long line.
A continued line is a line which ends with a backslash, ‘\’. The backslash is removed
and the following line is joined with the current one. No space is inserted, so you may
split a line anywhere, even in the middle of a word. (It is generally more readable to
split lines only at white space.)
The trailing backslash on a continued line is commonly referred to as a backslash-
newline.
If there is white space between a backslash and the end of a line, that is still a continued
line. However, as this is usually the result of an editing mistake, and many compilers
will not accept it as a continued line, GCC will warn you about it.
4. All comments are replaced with single spaces.
There are two kinds of comments. Block comments begin with ‘/*’ and continue until
the next ‘*/’. Block comments do not nest:
/* this is /* one comment */ text outside comment
Line comments begin with ‘//’ and continue to the end of the current line. Line
comments do not nest either, but it does not matter, because they would end in the
same place anyway.
// this is // one comment
text outside comment
It is safe to put line comments inside block comments, or vice versa.

/* block comment
// contains line comment
yet more comment
*/ outside comment
// line comment /* contains block comment */

But beware of commenting out one end of a block comment with a line comment.
// l.c. /* block comment begins
oops! this isn’t a comment anymore */
Comments are not recognized within string literals. "/* blah */" is the string constant
‘/* blah */’, not an empty string.
Line comments are not in the 1989 edition of the C standard, but they are recognized
by GCC as an extension. In C++ and in the 1999 edition of the C standard, they are an
official part of the language.
Since these transformations happen before all other processing, you can split a line
mechanically with backslash-newline anywhere. You can comment out the end of a line.
You can continue a line comment onto the next line with backslash-newline. You can even
split ‘/*’, ‘*/’, and ‘//’ onto multiple lines with backslash-newline. For example:
/\
*
*/ # /*
*/ defi\
ne FO\
O 10\
20
is equivalent to #define FOO 1020. All these tricks are extremely confusing and should not
be used in code intended to be readable.
There is no way to prevent a backslash at the end of a line from being interpreted as a
backslash-newline. This cannot affect any correct program, however.
1.3 Tokenization
After the textual transformations are finished, the input file is converted into a sequence
of preprocessing tokens. These mostly correspond to the syntactic tokens used by the C
compiler, but there are a few differences. White space separates tokens; it is not itself a
token of any kind. Tokens do not have to be separated by white space, but it is often
necessary to avoid ambiguities.
When faced with a sequence of characters that has more than one possible tokenization,
the preprocessor is greedy. It always makes each token, starting from the left, as big
as possible before moving on to the next token. For instance, a+++++b is interpreted as
a ++ ++ + b, not as a ++ + ++ b, even though the latter tokenization could be part of a valid
C program and the former could not.
Once the input file is broken into tokens, the token boundaries never change, except
when the ‘##’ preprocessing operator is used to paste tokens together. See Section 3.5
[Concatenation], page 18. For example,
#define foo() bar
foo()baz
7→ bar baz
not
7→ barbaz
The compiler does not re-tokenize the preprocessor’s output. Each preprocessing token
becomes one compiler token.
Preprocessing tokens fall into five broad classes: identifiers, preprocessing numbers,
string literals, punctuators, and other. An identifier is the same as an identifier in C:
any sequence of letters, digits, or underscores, which begins with a letter or underscore.
Keywords of C have no significance to the preprocessor; they are ordinary identifiers. You
can define a macro whose name is a keyword, for instance. The only identifier which can
be considered a preprocessing keyword is defined. See Section 4.2.3 [Defined], page 38.
This is mostly true of other languages which use the C preprocessor. However, a few of
the keywords of C++ are significant even in the preprocessor. See Section 3.7.4 [C++ Named
Operators], page 28.
In the 1999 C standard, identifiers may contain letters which are not part of the “ba-
sic source character set”, at the implementation’s discretion (such as accented Latin let-
ters, Greek letters, or Chinese ideograms). This may be done with an extended character
set, or the ‘\u’ and ‘\U’ escape sequences. The implementation of this feature in GCC
is experimental; such characters are only accepted in the ‘\u’ and ‘\U’ forms and only if
‘-fextended-identifiers’ is used.
As an extension, GCC treats ‘$’ as a letter. This is for compatibility with some systems,
such as VMS, where ‘$’ is commonly used in system-defined function and object names. ‘$’
is not a letter in strictly conforming mode, or if you specify the ‘-$’ option. See Chapter 12
A preprocessing number has a rather bizarre definition. The category includes all the
normal integer and floating point constants one expects of C, but also a number of other
things one might not initially recognize as a number. Formally, preprocessing numbers begin
with an optional period, a required decimal digit, and then continue with any sequence
of letters, digits, underscores, periods, and exponents. Exponents are the two-character
sequences ‘e+’, ‘e-’, ‘E+’, ‘E-’, ‘p+’, ‘p-’, ‘P+’, and ‘P-’. (The exponents that begin with ‘p’
or ‘P’ are new to C99. They are used for hexadecimal floating-point constants.)
The purpose of this unusual definition is to isolate the preprocessor from the full com-
plexity of numeric constants. It does not have to distinguish between lexically valid and
invalid floating-point numbers, which is complicated. The definition also permits you to
split an identifier at any position and get exactly two tokens, which can then be pasted
back together with the ‘##’ operator.
It’s possible for preprocessing numbers to cause programs to be misinterpreted. For
example, 0xE+12 is a preprocessing number which does not translate to any valid numeric
constant, therefore a syntax error. It does not mean 0xE + 12, which is what you might
have intended.
String literals are string constants, character constants, and header file names (the argu-
ment of ‘#include’).2 String constants and character constants are straightforward: "..."
or ’...’. In either case embedded quotes should be escaped with a backslash: ’\’’ is
the character constant for ‘’’. There is no limit on the length of a character constant, but
the value of a character constant that contains more than one character is implementation-
defined. See Chapter 11 [Implementation Details], page 48.
Header file names either look like string constants, "...", or are written with angle
brackets instead, <...>. In either case, backslash is an ordinary character. There is no
way to escape the closing quote or angle bracket. The preprocessor looks for the header file
in different places depending on which form you use. See Section 2.2 [Include Operation],
page 8.
No string literal may extend past the end of a line. Older versions of GCC accepted multi-
line string constants. You may use continued lines instead, or string constant concatenation.
See Section 11.4 [Differences from previous versions], page 51.
Punctuators are all the usual bits of punctuation which are meaningful to C and C++. All
but three of the punctuation characters in ASCII are C punctuators. The exceptions are ‘@’,
‘$’, and ‘‘’. In addition, all the two- and three-character operators are punctuators. There
2
The C standard uses the term string literal to refer only to what we are calling string constants.
are also six digraphs, which the C++ standard calls alternative tokens, which are merely
alternate ways to spell other punctuators. This is a second attempt to work around missing
punctuation in obsolete systems. It has no negative side effects, unlike trigraphs, but does
not cover as much ground. The digraphs and their corresponding normal punctuators are:
Digraph: <% %> <: :> %: %:%:
Punctuator: { } [ ] # ##
Any other single character is considered “other”. It is passed on to the preprocessor’s
output unmolested. The C compiler will almost certainly reject source code containing
“other” tokens. In ASCII, the only other characters are ‘@’, ‘$’, ‘‘’, and control charac-
ters other than NUL (all bits zero). (Note that ‘$’ is normally considered a letter.) All
characters with the high bit set (numeric range 0x7F–0xFF) are also “other” in the present
implementation. This will change when proper support for international character sets is
added to GCC.
NUL is a special case because of the high probability that its appearance is accidental,
and because it may be invisible to the user (many terminals do not display NUL at all).
Within comments, NULs are silently ignored, just as any other character would be. In
running text, NUL is considered white space. For example, these two directives have the
same meaning.
#define X^@1
#define X 1
(where ‘^@’ is ASCII NUL). Within string or character constants, NULs are preserved. In
the latter two cases the preprocessor emits a warning message.
1.4 The preprocessing language

After tokenization, the stream of tokens may simply be passed straight to the compiler’s
parser. However, if it contains any operations in the preprocessing language, it will be
transformed first. This stage corresponds roughly to the standard’s “translation phase 4”
and is what most people think of as the preprocessor’s job.
The preprocessing language consists of directives to be executed and macros to be ex-
panded. Its primary capabilities are:
• Inclusion of header files. These are files of declarations that can be substituted into
your program.
• Macro expansion. You can define macros, which are abbreviations for arbitrary frag-
ments of C code. The preprocessor will replace the macros with their definitions
throughout the program. Some macros are automatically defined for you.
• Conditional compilation. You can include or exclude parts of the program according
to various conditions.
• Line control. If you use a program to combine or rearrange source files into an inter-
mediate file which is then compiled, you can use line control to inform the compiler
where each source line originally came from.
• Diagnostics. You can detect problems at compile time and issue errors or warnings.
There are a few more, less useful, features.
Except for expansion of predefined macros, all these operations are triggered with pre-
processing directives. Preprocessing directives are lines in your program that start with
Chapter 2: Header Files 7
‘#’. Whitespace is allowed before and after the ‘#’. The ‘#’ is followed by an identifier, the
directive name. It specifies the operation to perform. Directives are commonly referred to
as ‘#name ’ where name is the directive name. For example, ‘#define’ is the directive that
defines a macro.
The ‘#’ which begins a directive cannot come from a macro expansion. Also, the directive
name is not macro expanded. Thus, if foo is defined as a macro expanding to define, that
does not make ‘#foo’ a valid preprocessing directive.
The set of valid directive names is fixed. Programs cannot define new preprocessing
directives.
Some directives require arguments; these make up the rest of the directive line and
must be separated from the directive name by whitespace. For example, ‘#define’ must be
followed by a macro name and the intended expansion of the macro.
A preprocessing directive cannot cover more than one line. The line may, however, be
continued with backslash-newline, or by a block comment which extends past the end of the
line. In either case, when the directive is processed, the continuations have already been
merged with the first line to make one long line.
2 Header Files
A header file is a file containing C declarations and macro definitions (see Chapter 3
[Macros], page 13) to be shared between several source files. You request the use of a
header file in your program by including it, with the C preprocessing directive ‘#include’.
Header files serve two purposes.
• System header files declare the interfaces to parts of the operating system. You include
them in your program to supply the definitions and declarations you need to invoke
system calls and libraries.
• Your own header files contain declarations for interfaces between the source files of your
program. Each time you have a group of related declarations and macro definitions all
or most of which are needed in several different source files, it is a good idea to create
a header file for them.
Including a header file produces the same results as copying the header file into each
source file that needs it. Such copying would be time-consuming and error-prone. With a
header file, the related declarations appear in only one place. If they need to be changed,
they can be changed in one place, and programs that include the header file will automat-
ically use the new version when next recompiled. The header file eliminates the labor of
finding and changing all the copies as well as the risk that a failure to find one copy will
result in inconsistencies within a program.
In C, the usual convention is to give header files names that end with ‘.h’. It is most
portable to use only letters, digits, dashes, and underscores in header file names, and at
most one dot.
2.1 Include Syntax

Both user and system header files are included using the preprocessing directive ‘#include’.
It has two variants:
#include <file >
This variant is used for system header files. It searches for a file named file in
a standard list of system directories. You can prepend directories to this list
with the ‘-I’ option (see Chapter 12 [Invocation], page 52).
#include "file "
This variant is used for header files of your own program. It searches for a file
named file first in the directory containing the current file, then in the quote
directories and then the same directories used for <file >. You can prepend
directories to the list of quote directories with the ‘-iquote’ option.
The argument of ‘#include’, whether delimited with quote marks or angle brackets,
behaves like a string constant in that comments are not recognized, and macro names are
not expanded. Thus, #include <x/*y> specifies inclusion of a system header file named
‘x/*y’.
However, if backslashes occur within file, they are considered ordinary text characters,
not escape characters. None of the character escape sequences appropriate to string con-
stants in C are processed. Thus, #include "x\n\\y" specifies a filename containing three
backslashes. (Some systems interpret ‘\’ as a pathname separator. All of these also interpret
‘/’ the same way. It is most portable to use only ‘/’.)
It is an error if there is anything (other than comments) on the line after the file name.
2.2 Include Operation

The ‘#include’ directive works by directing the C preprocessor to scan the specified file as
input before continuing with the rest of the current file. The output from the preprocessor
contains the output already generated, followed by the output resulting from the included
file, followed by the output that comes from the text after the ‘#include’ directive. For
example, if you have a header file ‘header.h’ as follows,
char *test (void);
and a main program called ‘program.c’ that uses the header file, like this,
int x;
#include "header.h"
int
main (void)
{
puts (test ());
}
the compiler will see the same token stream as it would if ‘program.c’ read
int x;
char *test (void);
int
main (void)
{
puts (test ());

}
Included files are not limited to declarations and macro definitions; those are merely the
typical uses. Any fragment of a C program can be included from another file. The include
file could even contain the beginning of a statement that is concluded in the containing file,
or the end of a statement that was started in the including file. However, an included file
must consist of complete tokens. Comments and string literals which have not been closed
by the end of an included file are invalid. For error recovery, they are considered to end at
the end of the file.
To avoid confusion, it is best if header files contain only complete syntactic units—
function declarations or definitions, type declarations, etc.
The line following the ‘#include’ directive is always treated as a separate line by the C
preprocessor, even if the included file lacks a final newline.
2.3 Search Path

GCC looks in several different places for headers. On a normal Unix system, if you do not
instruct it otherwise, it will look for headers requested with #include <file > in:
/usr/local/include
libdir /gcc/target /version /include
/usr/target /include
/usr/include
For C++ programs, it will also look in ‘/usr/include/g++-v3’, first. In the above, target
is the canonical name of the system GCC was configured to compile code for; often but not
always the same as the canonical name of the system it runs on. version is the version of
GCC in use.
You can add to this list with the ‘-Idir ’ command line option. All the directories named
by ‘-I’ are searched, in left-to-right order, before the default directories. The only exception
is when ‘dir’ is already searched by default. In this case, the option is ignored and the
search order for system directories remains unchanged.
Duplicate directories are removed from the quote and bracket search chains before the
two chains are merged to make the final search chain. Thus, it is possible for a directory to
occur twice in the final search chain if it was specified in both the quote and bracket chains.
You can prevent GCC from searching any of the default directories with the ‘-nostdinc’
option. This is useful when you are compiling an operating system kernel or some other
program that does not use the standard C library facilities, or the standard C library itself.
‘-I’ options are not ignored as described above when ‘-nostdinc’ is in effect.
GCC looks for headers requested with #include "file " first in the directory containing
the current file, then in the directories as specified by ‘-iquote’ options, then in the same
places it would have looked for a header requested with angle brackets. For example, if
‘/usr/include/sys/stat.h’ contains #include "types.h", GCC looks for ‘types.h’ first
in ‘/usr/include/sys’, then in its usual search path.
‘#line’ (see Chapter 6 [Line Control], page 40) does not change GCC’s idea of the
directory containing the current file.
You may put ‘-I-’ at any point in your list of ‘-I’ options. This has two effects. First,
directories appearing before the ‘-I-’ in the list are searched only for headers requested
with quote marks. Directories after ‘-I-’ are searched for all headers. Second, the directory
containing the current file is not searched for anything, unless it happens to be one of the
directories named by an ‘-I’ switch. ‘-I-’ is deprecated, ‘-iquote’ should be used instead.
‘-I. -I-’ is not the same as no ‘-I’ options at all, and does not cause the same behavior
for ‘<>’ includes that ‘""’ includes get with no special options. ‘-I.’ searches the compiler’s
current working directory for header files. That may or may not be the same as the directory
containing the current file.
If you need to look for headers in a directory named ‘-’, write ‘-I./-’.
There are several more ways to adjust the header search path. They are generally less
useful. See Chapter 12 [Invocation], page 52.
2.4 Once-Only Headers

If a header file happens to be included twice, the compiler will process its contents twice.
This is very likely to cause an error, e.g. when the compiler sees the same structure definition
twice. Even if it does not, it will certainly waste time.
The standard way to prevent this is to enclose the entire real contents of the file in a
conditional, like this:
/* File foo. */
#ifndef FILE_FOO_SEEN
#define FILE_FOO_SEEN
the entire file
#endif /* !FILE_FOO_SEEN */
This construct is commonly known as a wrapper #ifndef. When the header is included
again, the conditional will be false, because FILE_FOO_SEEN is defined. The preprocessor
will skip over the entire contents of the file, and the compiler will not see it twice.
CPP optimizes even further. It remembers when a header file has a wrapper ‘#ifndef’.
If a subsequent ‘#include’ specifies that header, and the macro in the ‘#ifndef’ is still
defined, it does not bother to rescan the file at all.
You can put comments outside the wrapper. They will not interfere with this optimiza-
tion.
The macro FILE_FOO_SEEN is called the controlling macro or guard macro. In a user
header file, the macro name should not begin with ‘_’. In a system header file, it should
begin with ‘__’ to avoid conflicts with user programs. In any kind of header file, the macro
name should contain the name of the file and some additional text, to avoid conflicts with
other header files.
2.5 Alternatives to Wrapper #ifndef

CPP supports two more ways of indicating that a header file should be read only once.
Neither one is as portable as a wrapper ‘#ifndef’ and we recommend you do not use them
in new programs, with the caveat that ‘#import’ is standard practice in Objective-C.
CPP supports a variant of ‘#include’ called ‘#import’ which includes a file, but does
so at most once. If you use ‘#import’ instead of ‘#include’, then you don’t need the
conditionals inside the header file to prevent multiple inclusion of the contents. ‘#import’
is standard in Objective-C, but is considered a deprecated extension in C and C++.
‘#import’ is not a well designed feature. It requires the users of a header file to know
that it should only be included once. It is much better for the header file’s implementor to
write the file so that users don’t need to know this. Using a wrapper ‘#ifndef’ accomplishes
this goal.
In the present implementation, a single use of ‘#import’ will prevent the file from ever
being read again, by either ‘#import’ or ‘#include’. You should not rely on this; do not
use both ‘#import’ and ‘#include’ to refer to the same header file.
Another way to prevent a header file from being included more than once is with the
‘#pragma once’ directive. If ‘#pragma once’ is seen when scanning a header file, that file
will never be read again, no matter what.
‘#pragma once’ does not have the problems that ‘#import’ does, but it is not recognized
by all preprocessors, so you cannot rely on it in a portable program.
2.6 Computed Includes

Sometimes it is necessary to select one of several different header files to be included into
your program. They might specify configuration parameters to be used on different sorts
of operating systems, for instance. You could do this with a series of conditionals,
#if SYSTEM_1
# include "system_1.h"
#elif SYSTEM_2
# include "system_2.h"
#elif SYSTEM_3
...
#endif
That rapidly becomes tedious. Instead, the preprocessor offers the ability to use a macro
for the header name. This is called a computed include. Instead of writing a header name
as the direct argument of ‘#include’, you simply put a macro name there instead:
#define SYSTEM_H "system_1.h"
...
#include SYSTEM_H
SYSTEM_H will be expanded, and the preprocessor will look for ‘system_1.h’ as if the
‘#include’ had been written that way originally. SYSTEM_H could be defined by your Make-
file with a ‘-D’ option.
You must be careful when you define the macro. ‘#define’ saves tokens, not text.
The preprocessor has no way of knowing that the macro will be used as the argument of
‘#include’, so it generates ordinary tokens, not a header name. This is unlikely to cause
problems if you use double-quote includes, which are close enough to string constants. If
you use angle brackets, however, you may have trouble.
The syntax of a computed include is actually a bit more general than the above. If
the first non-whitespace character after ‘#include’ is not ‘"’ or ‘<’, then the entire line is
macro-expanded like running text would be.
If the line expands to a single string constant, the contents of that string constant are the
file to be included. CPP does not re-examine the string for embedded quotes, but neither
does it process backslash escapes in the string. Therefore
#define HEADER "a\"b"

#include HEADER
looks for a file named ‘a\"b’. CPP searches for the file according to the rules for double-
quoted includes.
If the line expands to a token stream beginning with a ‘<’ token and including a ‘>’
token, then the tokens between the ‘<’ and the first ‘>’ are combined to form the filename
to be included. Any whitespace between tokens is reduced to a single space; then any space
after the initial ‘<’ is retained, but a trailing space before the closing ‘>’ is ignored. CPP
searches for the file according to the rules for angle-bracket includes.
In either case, if there are any tokens on the line after the file name, an error occurs and
the directive is not processed. It is also an error if the result of expansion does not match
either of the two expected forms.
These rules are implementation-defined behavior according to the C standard. To min-
imize the risk of different compilers interpreting your computed includes differently, we
recommend you use only a single object-like macro which expands to a string constant.
This will also minimize confusion for people reading your program.
2.7 Wrapper Headers

Sometimes it is necessary to adjust the contents of a system-provided header file without
editing it directly. GCC’s fixincludes operation does this, for example. One way to do
that would be to create a new header file with the same name and insert it in the search
path before the original header. That works fine as long as you’re willing to replace the old
header entirely. But what if you want to refer to the old header from the new one?
You cannot simply include the old header with ‘#include’. That will start from the
beginning, and find your new header again. If your header is not protected from multiple
inclusion (see Section 2.4 [Once-Only Headers], page 10), it will recurse infinitely and cause
a fatal error.
You could include the old header with an absolute pathname:
#include "/usr/include/old-header.h"
This works, but is not clean; should the system headers ever move, you would have to edit
the new headers to match.
There is no way to solve this problem within the C standard, but you can use the GNU
extension ‘#include_next’. It means, “Include the next file with this name”. This directive
works like ‘#include’ except in searching for the specified file: it starts searching the list
of header file directories after the directory in which the current file was found.
Suppose you specify ‘-I /usr/local/include’, and the list of directories to search
also includes ‘/usr/include’; and suppose both directories contain ‘signal.h’. Ordinary
#include <signal.h> finds the file under ‘/usr/local/include’. If that file contains
#include_next <signal.h>, it starts searching after that directory, and finds the file in
‘/usr/include’.
‘#include_next’ does not distinguish between <file > and "file " inclusion, nor does
it check that the file you specify has the same name as the current file. It simply looks
for the file named, starting with the directory in the search path after the one where the
current file was found.
Chapter 3: Macros 13
The use of ‘#include_next’ can lead to great confusion. We recommend it be used

only when there is no other alternative. In particular, it should not be used in the headers
belonging to a specific program; it should be used only to make global corrections along the
lines of fixincludes.
2.8 System Headers

The header files declaring interfaces to the operating system and runtime libraries often can-
not be written in strictly conforming C. Therefore, GCC gives code found in system headers
special treatment. All warnings, other than those generated by ‘#warning’ (see Chapter 5
[Diagnostics], page 40), are suppressed while GCC is processing a system header. Macros
defined in a system header are immune to a few warnings wherever they are expanded. This
immunity is granted on an ad-hoc basis, when we find that a warning generates lots of false
positives because of code in macros defined in system headers.
Normally, only the headers found in specific directories are considered system headers.
These directories are determined when GCC is compiled. There are, however, two ways to
make normal headers into system headers.
The ‘-isystem’ command line option adds its argument to the list of directories to search
for headers, just like ‘-I’. Any headers found in that directory will be considered system
headers.
All directories named by ‘-isystem’ are searched after all directories named by ‘-I’, no
matter what their order was on the command line. If the same directory is named by both
‘-I’ and ‘-isystem’, the ‘-I’ option is ignored. GCC provides an informative message when
this occurs if ‘-v’ is used.
There is also a directive, #pragma GCC system_header, which tells GCC to consider the
rest of the current include file a system header, no matter where it was found. Code that
comes before the ‘#pragma’ in the file will not be affected. #pragma GCC system_header
has no effect in the primary source file.
On very old systems, some of the pre-defined system header directories get even more
special treatment. GNU C++ considers code in headers found in those directories to be
surrounded by an extern "C" block. There is no way to request this behavior with a
‘#pragma’, or from the command line.
3 Macros
A macro is a fragment of code which has been given a name. Whenever the name is used, it
is replaced by the contents of the macro. There are two kinds of macros. They differ mostly
in what they look like when they are used. Object-like macros resemble data objects when
used, function-like macros resemble function calls.
You may define any valid identifier as a macro, even if it is a C keyword. The preprocessor
does not know anything about keywords. This can be useful if you wish to hide a keyword
such as const from an older compiler that does not understand it. However, the preprocessor
operator defined (see Section 4.2.3 [Defined], page 38) can never be defined as a macro,
and C++’s named operators (see Section 3.7.4 [C++ Named Operators], page 28) cannot be
macros when you are compiling C++.
3.1 Object-like Macros

An object-like macro is a simple identifier which will be replaced by a code fragment. It
is called object-like because it looks like a data object in code that uses it. They are most
commonly used to give symbolic names to numeric constants.
You create macros with the ‘#define’ directive. ‘#define’ is followed by the name of
the macro and then the token sequence it should be an abbreviation for, which is variously
referred to as the macro’s body, expansion or replacement list. For example,
#define BUFFER_SIZE 1024
defines a macro named BUFFER_SIZE as an abbreviation for the token 1024. If somewhere
after this ‘#define’ directive there comes a C statement of the form
foo = (char *) malloc (BUFFER_SIZE);
then the C preprocessor will recognize and expand the macro BUFFER_SIZE. The C compiler
will see the same tokens as it would if you had written
foo = (char *) malloc (1024);
By convention, macro names are written in uppercase. Programs are easier to read when
it is possible to tell at a glance which names are macros.
The macro’s body ends at the end of the ‘#define’ line. You may continue the definition
onto multiple lines, if necessary, using backslash-newline. When the macro is expanded,
however, it will all come out on one line. For example,
#define NUMBERS 1, \
2, \
3
int x[] = { NUMBERS };
7→ int x[] = { 1, 2, 3 };
The most common visible consequence of this is surprising line numbers in error messages.
There is no restriction on what can go in a macro body provided it decomposes into
valid preprocessing tokens. Parentheses need not balance, and the body need not resemble
valid C code. (If it does not, you may get error messages from the C compiler when you
use the macro.)
The C preprocessor scans your program sequentially. Macro definitions take effect at
the place you write them. Therefore, the following input to the C preprocessor
foo = X;
#define X 4
bar = X;
produces
foo = X;
bar = 4;
When the preprocessor expands a macro name, the macro’s expansion replaces the macro
invocation, then the expansion is examined for more macros to expand. For example,
#define TABLESIZE BUFSIZE
#define BUFSIZE 1024
TABLESIZE
7→ BUFSIZE
7→ 1024
TABLESIZE is expanded first to produce BUFSIZE, then that macro is expanded to produce
the final result, 1024.
Notice that BUFSIZE was not defined when TABLESIZE was defined. The ‘#define’ for
TABLESIZE uses exactly the expansion you specify—in this case, BUFSIZE—and does not
check to see whether it too contains macro names. Only when you use TABLESIZE is the
result of its expansion scanned for more macro names.
This makes a difference if you change the definition of BUFSIZE at some point in the source
file. TABLESIZE, defined as shown, will always expand using the definition of BUFSIZE that
is currently in effect:
#define BUFSIZE 1020
#define TABLESIZE BUFSIZE
#undef BUFSIZE
#define BUFSIZE 37
Now TABLESIZE expands (in two stages) to 37.

If the expansion of a macro contains its own name, either directly or via intermediate
macros, it is not expanded again when the expansion is examined for more macros. This
prevents infinite recursion. See Section 3.10.5 [Self-Referential Macros], page 33, for the
precise details.
3.2 Function-like Macros

You can also define macros whose use looks like a function call. These are called function-
like macros. To define a function-like macro, you use the same ‘#define’ directive, but you
put a pair of parentheses immediately after the macro name. For example,
#define lang_init() c_init()
lang_init()
7→ c_init()
A function-like macro is only expanded if its name appears with a pair of parentheses
after it. If you write just the name, it is left alone. This can be useful when you have a
function and a macro of the same name, and you wish to use the function sometimes.
extern void foo(void);
#define foo() /* optimized inline version */
...
foo();
funcptr = foo;
Here the call to foo() will use the macro, but the function pointer will get the address
of the real function. If the macro were to be expanded, it would cause a syntax error.
If you put spaces between the macro name and the parentheses in the macro definition,
that does not define a function-like macro, it defines an object-like macro whose expansion
happens to begin with a pair of parentheses.
#define lang_init () c_init()
lang_init()
7→ () c_init()()
The first two pairs of parentheses in this expansion come from the macro. The third is
the pair that was originally after the macro invocation. Since lang_init is an object-like
macro, it does not consume those parentheses.
3.3 Macro Arguments

Function-like macros can take arguments, just like true functions. To define a macro that
uses arguments, you insert parameters between the pair of parentheses in the macro def-
inition that make the macro function-like. The parameters must be valid C identifiers,
separated by commas and optionally whitespace.
To invoke a macro that takes arguments, you write the name of the macro followed by a
list of actual arguments in parentheses, separated by commas. The invocation of the macro
need not be restricted to a single logical line—it can cross as many lines in the source file
as you wish. The number of arguments you give must match the number of parameters in
the macro definition. When the macro is expanded, each use of a parameter in its body
is replaced by the tokens of the corresponding argument. (You need not use all of the
parameters in the macro body.)
As an example, here is a macro that computes the minimum of two numeric values, as
it is defined in many C programs, and some uses.
#define min(X, Y) ((X) < (Y) ? (X) : (Y))
x = min(a, b); 7 → x = ((a) < (b) ? (a) : (b));
y = min(1, 2); 7→ y = ((1) < (2) ? (1) : (2));
z = min(a + 28, *p); 7→ z = ((a + 28) < (*p) ? (a + 28) : (*p));
(In this small example you can already see several of the dangers of macro arguments. See
Section 3.10 [Macro Pitfalls], page 30, for detailed explanations.)
Leading and trailing whitespace in each argument is dropped, and all whitespace between
the tokens of an argument is reduced to a single space. Parentheses within each argument
must balance; a comma within such parentheses does not end the argument. However,
there is no requirement for square brackets or braces to balance, and they do not prevent a
comma from separating arguments. Thus,
macro (array[x = y, x + 1])
passes two arguments to macro: array[x = y and x + 1]. If you want to supply array[x =
y, x + 1] as an argument, you can write it as array[(x = y, x + 1)], which is equivalent
C code.
All arguments to a macro are completely macro-expanded before they are substituted
into the macro body. After substitution, the complete text is scanned again for macros to
expand, including the arguments. This rule may seem strange, but it is carefully designed
so you need not worry about whether any function call is actually a macro invocation. You
can run into trouble if you try to be too clever, though. See Section 3.10.6 [Argument
Prescan], page 34, for detailed discussion.
For example, min (min (a, b), c) is first expanded to
min (((a) < (b) ? (a) : (b)), (c))
and then to
((((a) < (b) ? (a) : (b))) < (c)
? (((a) < (b) ? (a) : (b)))
: (c))
(Line breaks shown here for clarity would not actually be generated.)
You can leave macro arguments empty; this is not an error to the preprocessor (but
many macros will then expand to invalid code). You cannot leave out arguments entirely;
if a macro takes two arguments, there must be exactly one comma at the top level of its
argument list. Here are some silly examples using min:
min(, b) 7→ (( ) < (b) ? ( ) : (b))

min(a, ) 7 → ((a ) < ( ) ? (a ) : ( ))
min(,) 7 → (( ) < ( ) ? ( ) : ( ))
min((,),) 7 → (((,)) < ( ) ? ((,)) : ( ))
min() error macro "min" requires 2 arguments, but only 1 given

min(,,) error macro "min" passed 3 arguments, but takes just 2
Whitespace is not a preprocessing token, so if a macro foo takes one argument, foo ()
and foo ( ) both supply it an empty argument. Previous GNU preprocessor implementa-
tions and documentation were incorrect on this point, insisting that a function-like macro
that takes a single argument be passed a space if an empty argument was required.
Macro parameters appearing inside string literals are not replaced by their corresponding
actual arguments.
#define foo(x) x, "x"
foo(bar) 7→ bar, "x"
3.4 Stringification
Sometimes you may want to convert a macro argument into a string constant. Parameters
are not replaced inside string constants, but you can use the ‘#’ preprocessing operator
instead. When a macro parameter is used with a leading ‘#’, the preprocessor replaces
it with the literal text of the actual argument, converted to a string constant. Unlike
normal parameter replacement, the argument is not macro-expanded first. This is called
stringification.
There is no way to combine an argument with surrounding text and stringify it all
together. Instead, you can write a series of adjacent string constants and stringified argu-
ments. The preprocessor will replace the stringified arguments with string constants. The
C compiler will then combine all the adjacent string constants into one long string.
Here is an example of a macro definition that uses stringification:
#define WARN_IF(EXP) \
do { if (EXP) \
fprintf (stderr, "Warning: " #EXP "\n"); } \
while (0)
WARN_IF (x == 0);
7→ do { if (x == 0)
fprintf (stderr, "Warning: " "x == 0" "\n"); } while (0);
The argument for EXP is substituted once, as-is, into the if statement, and once, stringified,
into the argument to fprintf. If x were a macro, it would be expanded in the if statement,
but not in the string.
The do and while (0) are a kludge to make it possible to write WARN_IF (arg );, which
the resemblance of WARN_IF to a function would make C programmers want to do; see
Section 3.10.3 [Swallowing the Semicolon], page 31.
Stringification in C involves more than putting double-quote characters around the frag-
ment. The preprocessor backslash-escapes the quotes surrounding embedded string con-
stants, and all backslashes within string and character constants, in order to get a valid
C string constant with the proper contents. Thus, stringifying p = "foo\n"; results in
"p = \"foo\\n\";". However, backslashes that are not inside string or character constants
are not duplicated: ‘\n’ by itself stringifies to "\n".
All leading and trailing whitespace in text being stringified is ignored. Any sequence of
whitespace in the middle of the text is converted to a single space in the stringified result.
Comments are replaced by whitespace long before stringification happens, so they never
appear in stringified text.
There is no way to convert a macro argument into a character constant.
If you want to stringify the result of expansion of a macro argument, you have to use
two levels of macros.
#define xstr(s) str(s)
#define str(s) #s
#define foo 4
str (foo)
7→ "foo"
xstr (foo)
7→ xstr (4)
7→ str (4)
7→ "4"
s is stringified when it is used in str, so it is not macro-expanded first. But s is
an ordinary argument to xstr, so it is completely macro-expanded before xstr itself is
expanded (see Section 3.10.6 [Argument Prescan], page 34). Therefore, by the time str
gets to its argument, it has already been macro-expanded.
3.5 Concatenation
It is often useful to merge two tokens into one while expanding macros. This is called token
pasting or token concatenation. The ‘##’ preprocessing operator performs token pasting.
When a macro is expanded, the two tokens on either side of each ‘##’ operator are combined
into a single token, which then replaces the ‘##’ and the two original tokens in the macro
expansion. Usually both will be identifiers, or one will be an identifier and the other a
preprocessing number. When pasted, they make a longer identifier. This isn’t the only
valid case. It is also possible to concatenate two numbers (or a number and a name, such
as 1.5 and e3) into a number. Also, multi-character operators such as += can be formed
by token pasting.
However, two tokens that don’t together form a valid token cannot be pasted together.
For example, you cannot concatenate x with + in either order. If you try, the preprocessor
issues a warning and emits the two tokens. Whether it puts white space between the tokens
is undefined. It is common to find unnecessary uses of ‘##’ in complex macros. If you get
this warning, it is likely that you can simply remove the ‘##’.
Both the tokens combined by ‘##’ could come from the macro body, but you could just
as well write them as one token in the first place. Token pasting is most useful when one
or both of the tokens comes from a macro argument. If either of the tokens next to an ‘##’
is a parameter name, it is replaced by its actual argument before ‘##’ executes. As with
stringification, the actual argument is not macro-expanded first. If the argument is empty,
that ‘##’ has no effect.
Keep in mind that the C preprocessor converts comments to whitespace before macros
are even considered. Therefore, you cannot create a comment by concatenating ‘/’ and
‘*’. You can put as much whitespace between ‘##’ and its operands as you like, including
comments, and you can put comments in arguments that will be concatenated. However,
it is an error if ‘##’ appears at either end of a macro body.
Consider a C program that interprets named commands. There probably needs to be a

table of commands, perhaps an array of structures declared as follows:
struct command
{
char *name;
void (*function) (void);
};
struct command commands[] =

{
{ "quit", quit_command },
{ "help", help_command },
...
};
It would be cleaner not to have to give each command name twice, once in the string
constant and once in the function name. A macro which takes the name of a command as
an argument can make this unnecessary. The string constant can be created with stringi-
fication, and the function name by concatenating the argument with ‘_command’. Here is
how it is done:
#define COMMAND(NAME) { #NAME, NAME ## _command }
struct command commands[] =

{
COMMAND (quit),
COMMAND (help),
...
};
3.6 Variadic Macros

A macro can be declared to accept a variable number of arguments much as a function can.
The syntax for defining the macro is similar to that of a function. Here is an example:
#define eprintf(...) fprintf (stderr, __VA_ARGS__)
This kind of macro is called variadic. When the macro is invoked, all the tokens in its
argument list after the last named argument (this macro has none), including any commas,
become the variable argument. This sequence of tokens replaces the identifier __VA_ARGS__
in the macro body wherever it appears. Thus, we have this expansion:
eprintf ("%s:%d: ", input_file, lineno)
7→ fprintf (stderr, "%s:%d: ", input_file, lineno)
The variable argument is completely macro-expanded before it is inserted into the macro
expansion, just like an ordinary argument. You may use the ‘#’ and ‘##’ operators to
stringify the variable argument or to paste its leading or trailing token with another token.
(But see below for an important special case for ‘##’.)
If your macro is complicated, you may want a more descriptive name for the variable
argument than __VA_ARGS__. CPP permits this, as an extension. You may write an argu-
ment name immediately before the ‘...’; that name is used for the variable argument. The
eprintf macro above could be written
#define eprintf(args...) fprintf (stderr, args)
using this extension. You cannot use __VA_ARGS__ and this extension in the same macro.
You can have named arguments as well as variable arguments in a variadic macro. We
could define eprintf like this, instead:
#define eprintf(format, ...) fprintf (stderr, format, __VA_ARGS__)
This formulation looks more descriptive, but unfortunately it is less flexible: you must now
supply at least one argument after the format string. In standard C, you cannot omit the
comma separating the named argument from the variable arguments. Furthermore, if you
leave the variable argument empty, you will get a syntax error, because there will be an
extra comma after the format string.
eprintf("success!\n", );
7→ fprintf(stderr, "success!\n", );
GNU CPP has a pair of extensions which deal with this problem. First, you are allowed
to leave the variable argument out entirely:
eprintf ("success!\n")
7→ fprintf(stderr, "success!\n", );
Second, the ‘##’ token paste operator has a special meaning when placed between a comma
and a variable argument. If you write
#define eprintf(format, ...) fprintf (stderr, format, ##__VA_ARGS__)
and the variable argument is left out when the eprintf macro is used, then the comma
before the ‘##’ will be deleted. This does not happen if you pass an empty argument, nor
does it happen if the token preceding ‘##’ is anything other than a comma.
eprintf ("success!\n")
7→ fprintf(stderr, "success!\n");
The above explanation is ambiguous about the case where the only macro parameter is a
variable arguments parameter, as it is meaningless to try to distinguish whether no argument
at all is an empty argument or a missing argument. In this case the C99 standard is clear
that the comma must remain, however the existing GCC extension used to swallow the
comma. So CPP retains the comma when conforming to a specific C standard, and drops
it otherwise.
C99 mandates that the only place the identifier __VA_ARGS__ can appear is in the re-
placement list of a variadic macro. It may not be used as a macro name, macro argument
name, or within a different type of macro. It may also be forbidden in open text; the
standard is ambiguous. We recommend you avoid using it except for its defined purpose.
Variadic macros are a new feature in C99. GNU CPP has supported them for a long
time, but only with a named variable argument (‘args...’, not ‘...’ and __VA_ARGS__).
If you are concerned with portability to previous versions of GCC, you should use only
named variable arguments. On the other hand, if you are concerned with portability to
other conforming implementations of C99, you should use only __VA_ARGS__.
Previous versions of CPP implemented the comma-deletion extension much more gener-
ally. We have restricted it in this release to minimize the differences from C99. To get the
same effect with both this and previous versions of GCC, the token preceding the special
‘##’ must be a comma, and there must be white space between that comma and whatever
comes immediately before it:
#define eprintf(format, args...) fprintf (stderr, format , ##args)
See Section 11.4 [Differences from previous versions], page 51, for the gory details.
3.7 Predefined Macros

Several object-like macros are predefined; you use them without supplying their definitions.
They fall into three classes: standard, common, and system-specific.
In C++, there is a fourth category, the named operators. They act like predefined macros,
but you cannot undefine them.
3.7.1 Standard Predefined Macros

The standard predefined macros are specified by the relevant language standards, so they
are available with all compilers that implement those standards. Older compilers may not
provide all of them. Their names all start with double underscores.
__FILE__ This macro expands to the name of the current input file, in the form of a C
string constant. This is the path by which the preprocessor opened the file, not
the short name specified in ‘#include’ or as the input file name argument. For
example, "/usr/local/include/myheader.h" is a possible expansion of this
macro.
__LINE__ This macro expands to the current input line number, in the form of a decimal
integer constant. While we call it a predefined macro, it’s a pretty strange
macro, since its “definition” changes with each new line of source code.
__FILE__ and __LINE__ are useful in generating an error message to report an in-
consistency detected by the program; the message can state the source line at which the
inconsistency was detected. For example,
fprintf (stderr, "Internal error: "
"negative string length "
"%d at %s, line %d.",
length, __FILE__, __LINE__);
An ‘#include’ directive changes the expansions of __FILE__ and __LINE__ to correspond
to the included file. At the end of that file, when processing resumes on the input file that
contained the ‘#include’ directive, the expansions of __FILE__ and __LINE__ revert to
the values they had before the ‘#include’ (but __LINE__ is then incremented by one as
processing moves to the line after the ‘#include’).
A ‘#line’ directive changes __LINE__, and may change __FILE__ as well. See Chapter 6
[Line Control], page 40.
C99 introduces __func__, and GCC has provided __FUNCTION__ for a long time. Both
of these are strings containing the name of the current function (there are slight semantic
differences; see the GCC manual). Neither of them is a macro; the preprocessor does not
know the name of the current function. They tend to be useful in conjunction with __FILE__
and __LINE__, though.
__DATE__ This macro expands to a string constant that describes the date on which the
preprocessor is being run. The string constant contains eleven characters and
looks like "Feb 12 1996". If the day of the month is less than 10, it is padded
with a space on the left.
If GCC cannot determine the current date, it will emit a warning message (once
per compilation) and __DATE__ will expand to "??? ?? ????".
__TIME__ This macro expands to a string constant that describes the time at which the
preprocessor is being run. The string constant contains eight characters and
looks like "23:59:01".
If GCC cannot determine the current time, it will emit a warning message (once
per compilation) and __TIME__ will expand to "??:??:??".
__STDC__ In normal operation, this macro expands to the constant 1, to signify that this
compiler conforms to ISO Standard C. If GNU CPP is used with a compiler
other than GCC, this is not necessarily true; however, the preprocessor always
conforms to the standard unless the ‘-traditional-cpp’ option is used.
This macro is not defined if the ‘-traditional-cpp’ option is used.
On some hosts, the system compiler uses a different convention, where __STDC__
is normally 0, but is 1 if the user specifies strict conformance to the C Standard.
CPP follows the host convention when processing system header files, but when
processing user files __STDC__ is always 1. This has been reported to cause
problems; for instance, some versions of Solaris provide X Windows headers
that expect __STDC__ to be either undefined or 1. See Chapter 12 [Invocation],
page 52.
__STDC_VERSION__
This macro expands to the C Standard’s version number, a long integer constant
of the form yyyy mm L where yyyy and mm are the year and month of the
Standard version. This signifies which version of the C Standard the compiler
conforms to. Like __STDC__, this is not necessarily accurate for the entire
implementation, unless GNU CPP is being used with GCC.
The value 199409L signifies the 1989 C standard as amended in 1994, which
is the current default; the value 199901L signifies the 1999 revision of the C
standard. Support for the 1999 revision is not yet complete.
This macro is not defined if the ‘-traditional-cpp’ option is used, nor when
compiling C++ or Objective-C.
__STDC_HOSTED__
This macro is defined, with value 1, if the compiler’s target is a hosted envi-
ronment. A hosted environment has the complete facilities of the standard C
library available.
__cplusplus
This macro is defined when the C++ compiler is in use. You can use __
cplusplus to test whether a header is compiled by a C compiler or a C++
compiler. This macro is similar to __STDC_VERSION__, in that it expands to a
version number. A fully conforming implementation of the 1998 C++ standard
will define this macro to 199711L. The GNU C++ compiler is not yet fully
conforming, so it uses 1 instead. It is hoped to complete the implementation of
standard C++ in the near future.
__OBJC__ This macro is defined, with value 1, when the Objective-C compiler is in use.
You can use __OBJC__ to test whether a header is compiled by a C compiler or
a Objective-C compiler.
__ASSEMBLER__
This macro is defined with value 1 when preprocessing assembly language.
3.7.2 Common Predefined Macros

The common predefined macros are GNU C extensions. They are available with the same
meanings regardless of the machine or operating system on which you are using GNU C or
GNU Fortran. Their names all start with double underscores.
__COUNTER__
This macro expands to sequential integral values starting from 0. In conjunction
with the ## operator, this provides a convenient means to generate unique iden-
tifiers. Care must be taken to ensure that __COUNTER__ is not expanded prior
to inclusion of precompiled headers which use it. Otherwise, the precompiled
headers will not be used.
__GFORTRAN__
The GNU Fortran compiler defines this.
__GNUC__
__GNUC_MINOR__
__GNUC_PATCHLEVEL__
These macros are defined by all GNU compilers that use the C preproces-
sor: C, C++, Objective-C and Fortran. Their values are the major version,
minor version, and patch level of the compiler, as integer constants. For ex-
ample, GCC 3.2.1 will define __GNUC__ to 3, __GNUC_MINOR__ to 2, and __
GNUC_PATCHLEVEL__ to 1. These macros are also defined if you invoke the
preprocessor directly.
__GNUC_PATCHLEVEL__ is new to GCC 3.0; it is also present in the widely-used
development snapshots leading up to 3.0 (which identify themselves as GCC
2.96 or 2.97, depending on which snapshot you have).
If all you need to know is whether or not your program is being compiled by
GCC, or a non-GCC compiler that claims to accept the GNU C dialects, you
can simply test __GNUC__. If you need to write code which depends on a specific
version, you must be more careful. Each time the minor version is increased,
the patch level is reset to zero; each time the major version is increased (which
happens rarely), the minor version and patch level are reset. If you wish to use
the predefined macros directly in the conditional, you will need to write it like
this:
/* Test for GCC > 3.2.0 */
#if __GNUC__ > 3 || \
(__GNUC__ == 3 && (__GNUC_MINOR__ > 2 || \
(__GNUC_MINOR__ == 2 && \
__GNUC_PATCHLEVEL__ > 0))
Another approach is to use the predefined macros to calculate a single number,
then compare that against a threshold:
#define GCC_VERSION (__GNUC__ * 10000 \
+ __GNUC_MINOR__ * 100 \
+ __GNUC_PATCHLEVEL__)
...
/* Test for GCC > 3.2.0 */

#if GCC_VERSION > 30200
Many people find this form easier to understand.
__GNUG__ The GNU C++ compiler defines this. Testing it is equivalent to testing
(__GNUC__ && __cplusplus).
__STRICT_ANSI__
GCC defines this macro if and only if the ‘-ansi’ switch, or a ‘-std’ switch
specifying strict conformance to some version of ISO C, was specified when
GCC was invoked. It is defined to ‘1’. This macro exists primarily to direct
GNU libc’s header files to restrict their definitions to the minimal set found in
the 1989 C standard.
__BASE_FILE__
This macro expands to the name of the main input file, in the form of a C string
constant. This is the source file that was specified on the command line of the
preprocessor or C compiler.
__INCLUDE_LEVEL__
This macro expands to a decimal integer constant that represents the depth
of nesting in include files. The value of this macro is incremented on every
‘#include’ directive and decremented at the end of every included file. It
starts out at 0, its value within the base file specified on the command line.
__ELF__ This macro is defined if the target uses the ELF object format.
__VERSION__
This macro expands to a string constant which describes the version of the
compiler in use. You should not rely on its contents having any particular
form, but it can be counted on to contain at least the release number.
__OPTIMIZE__
__OPTIMIZE_SIZE__
__NO_INLINE__
These macros describe the compilation mode. __OPTIMIZE__ is defined in all
optimizing compilations. __OPTIMIZE_SIZE__ is defined if the compiler is op-
timizing for size, not speed. __NO_INLINE__ is defined if no functions will
be inlined into their callers (when not optimizing, or when inlining has been
specifically disabled by ‘-fno-inline’).
These macros cause certain GNU header files to provide optimized definitions,
using macros or inline functions, of system library functions. You should not
use these macros in any way unless you make sure that programs will execute
with the same effect whether or not they are defined. If they are defined, their
value is 1.
__GNUC_GNU_INLINE__
GCC defines this macro if functions declared inline will be handled in GCC’s
traditional gnu89 mode. Object files will contain externally visible definitions of
all functions declared inline without extern or static. They will not contain
any definitions of any functions declared extern inline.
__GNUC_STDC_INLINE__
GCC defines this macro if functions declared inline will be handled according
to the ISO C99 standard. Object files will contain externally visible definitions
of all functions declared extern inline. They will not contain definitions of
any functions declared inline without extern.
If this macro is defined, GCC supports the gnu_inline function attribute as
a way to always get the gnu89 behavior. Support for this and __GNUC_GNU_
INLINE__ was added in GCC 4.1.3. If neither macro is defined, an older version
of GCC is being used: inline functions will be compiled in gnu89 mode, and
the gnu_inline function attribute will not be recognized.
__CHAR_UNSIGNED__
GCC defines this macro if and only if the data type char is unsigned on the
target machine. It exists to cause the standard header file ‘limits.h’ to work
correctly. You should not use this macro yourself; instead, refer to the standard
macros defined in ‘limits.h’.
__WCHAR_UNSIGNED__
Like __CHAR_UNSIGNED__, this macro is defined if and only if the data type
wchar_t is unsigned and the front-end is in C++ mode.
__REGISTER_PREFIX__
This macro expands to a single token (not a string constant) which is the prefix
applied to CPU register names in assembly language for this target. You can
use it to write assembly that is usable in multiple environments. For example,
in the m68k-aout environment it expands to nothing, but in the m68k-coff
environment it expands to a single ‘%’.
__USER_LABEL_PREFIX__
This macro expands to a single token which is the prefix applied to user labels
(symbols visible to C code) in assembly. For example, in the m68k-aout envi-
ronment it expands to an ‘_’, but in the m68k-coff environment it expands to
nothing.
This macro will have the correct definition even if ‘-f(no-)underscores’ is in
use, but it will not be correct if target-specific options that adjust this prefix
are used (e.g. the OSF/rose ‘-mno-underscores’ option).
__SIZE_TYPE__
__PTRDIFF_TYPE__
__WCHAR_TYPE__
__WINT_TYPE__
__INTMAX_TYPE__
__UINTMAX_TYPE__
These macros are defined to the correct underlying types for the size_t,
ptrdiff_t, wchar_t, wint_t, intmax_t, and uintmax_t typedefs, respectively.
They exist to make the standard header files ‘stddef.h’ and ‘wchar.h’ work
correctly. You should not use these macros directly; instead, include the
appropriate headers and use the typedefs.
__CHAR_BIT__
Defined to the number of bits used in the representation of the char data type.
It exists to make the standard header given numerical limits work correctly. You
should not use this macro directly; instead, include the appropriate headers.
__SCHAR_MAX__
__WCHAR_MAX__
__SHRT_MAX__
__INT_MAX__
__LONG_MAX__
__LONG_LONG_MAX__
__INTMAX_MAX__
Defined to the maximum value of the signed char, wchar_t, signed
short, signed int, signed long, signed long long, and intmax_t types
respectively. They exist to make the standard header given numerical limits
work correctly. You should not use these macros directly; instead, include the
appropriate headers.
__SIZEOF_INT__
__SIZEOF_LONG__
__SIZEOF_LONG_LONG__
__SIZEOF_SHORT__
__SIZEOF_POINTER__
__SIZEOF_FLOAT__
__SIZEOF_DOUBLE__
__SIZEOF_LONG_DOUBLE__
__SIZEOF_SIZE_T__
__SIZEOF_WCHAR_T__
__SIZEOF_WINT_T__
__SIZEOF_PTRDIFF_T__
Defined to the number of bytes of the C standard data types: int, long, long
long, short, void *, float, double, long double, size_t, wchar_t, wint_t
and ptrdiff_t.
__DEPRECATED
This macro is defined, with value 1, when compiling a C++ source file with
warnings about deprecated constructs enabled. These warnings are enabled by
default, but can be disabled with ‘-Wno-deprecated’.
__EXCEPTIONS
exceptions enabled. If ‘-fno-exceptions’ is used when compiling the file, then
this macro is not defined.
__GXX_RTTI
runtime type identification enabled. If ‘-fno-rtti’ is used when compiling the
file, then this macro is not defined.
__USING_SJLJ_EXCEPTIONS__
This macro is defined, with value 1, if the compiler uses the old mechanism
based on setjmp and longjmp for exception handling.
__GXX_EXPERIMENTAL_CXX0X__
This macro is defined when compiling a C++ source file with the option
‘-std=c++0x’ or ‘-std=gnu++0x’. It indicates that some features likely to be
included in C++0x are available. Note that these features are experimental,
and may change or be removed in future versions of GCC.
__GXX_WEAK__
This macro is defined when compiling a C++ source file. It has the value 1 if the
compiler will use weak symbols, COMDAT sections, or other similar techniques
to collapse symbols with “vague linkage” that are defined in multiple translation
units. If the compiler will not collapse such symbols, this macro is defined with
value 0. In general, user code should not need to make use of this macro; the
purpose of this macro is to ease implementation of the C++ runtime library
provided with G++.
__NEXT_RUNTIME__
This macro is defined, with value 1, if (and only if) the NeXT runtime (as
in ‘-fnext-runtime’) is in use for Objective-C. If the GNU runtime is used,
this macro is not defined, so that you can use this macro to determine which
runtime (NeXT or GNU) is being used.
__LP64__
_LP64 These macros are defined, with value 1, if (and only if) the compilation is for a
target where long int and pointer both use 64-bits and int uses 32-bit.
__SSP__ This macro is defined, with value 1, when ‘-fstack-protector’ is in use.
__SSP_ALL__
This macro is defined, with value 2, when ‘-fstack-protector-all’ is in use.
__TIMESTAMP__
This macro expands to a string constant that describes the date and time of
the last modification of the current source file. The string constant contains
abbreviated day of the week, month, day of the month, time in hh:mm:ss form,
year and looks like "Sun Sep 16 01:03:52 1973". If the day of the month is
less than 10, it is padded with a space on the left.
If GCC cannot determine the current date, it will emit a warning
message (once per compilation) and __TIMESTAMP__ will expand to
"??? ??? ?? ??:??:?? ????".
__GCC_HAVE_SYNC_COMPARE_AND_SWAP_1
These macros are defined when the target processor supports atomic compare
and swap operations on operands 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16 bytes in length, respectively.
__GCC_HAVE_DWARF2_CFI_ASM
This macro is defined when the compiler is emitting Dwarf2 CFI directives to
the assembler. When this is defined, it is possible to emit those same directives
in inline assembly.
3.7.3 System-specific Predefined Macros

The C preprocessor normally predefines several macros that indicate what type of system
and machine is in use. They are obviously different on each target supported by GCC. This
manual, being for all systems and machines, cannot tell you what their names are, but you
can use cpp -dM to see them all. See Chapter 12 [Invocation], page 52. All system-specific
predefined macros expand to the constant 1, so you can test them with either ‘#ifdef’ or
‘#if’.
The C standard requires that all system-specific macros be part of the reserved names-
pace. All names which begin with two underscores, or an underscore and a capital letter,
are reserved for the compiler and library to use as they wish. However, historically system-
specific macros have had names with no special prefix; for instance, it is common to find
unix defined on Unix systems. For all such macros, GCC provides a parallel macro with
two underscores added at the beginning and the end. If unix is defined, __unix__ will
be defined too. There will never be more than two underscores; the parallel of _mips is
__mips__.
When the ‘-ansi’ option, or any ‘-std’ option that requests strict conformance, is given
to the compiler, all the system-specific predefined macros outside the reserved namespace
are suppressed. The parallel macros, inside the reserved namespace, remain defined.
We are slowly phasing out all predefined macros which are outside the reserved names-
pace. You should never use them in new programs, and we encourage you to correct older
code to use the parallel macros whenever you find it. We don’t recommend you use the
system-specific macros that are in the reserved namespace, either. It is better in the long
run to check specifically for features you need, using a tool such as autoconf.
3.7.4 C++ Named Operators

In C++, there are eleven keywords which are simply alternate spellings of operators normally
written with punctuation. These keywords are treated as such even in the preprocessor.
They function as operators in ‘#if’, and they cannot be defined as macros or poisoned. In
C, you can request that those keywords take their C++ meaning by including ‘iso646.h’.
That header defines each one as a normal object-like macro expanding to the appropriate
punctuator.
These are the named operators and their corresponding punctuators:
Named Operator Punctuator
and &&
and_eq &=
bitand &
bitor |
compl ~
not !
not_eq !=
or ||
or_eq |=
xor ^
xor_eq ^=
3.8 Undefining and Redefining Macros

If a macro ceases to be useful, it may be undefined with the ‘#undef’ directive. ‘#undef’
takes a single argument, the name of the macro to undefine. You use the bare macro name,
even if the macro is function-like. It is an error if anything appears on the line after the
macro name. ‘#undef’ has no effect if the name is not a macro.
#define FOO 4
x = FOO; 7→ x = 4;
#undef FOO
x = FOO; 7→ x = FOO;
Once a macro has been undefined, that identifier may be redefined as a macro by a
subsequent ‘#define’ directive. The new definition need not have any resemblance to the
old definition.
However, if an identifier which is currently a macro is redefined, then the new definition
must be effectively the same as the old one. Two macro definitions are effectively the same
if:
• Both are the same type of macro (object- or function-like).
• All the tokens of the replacement list are the same.
• If there are any parameters, they are the same.
• Whitespace appears in the same places in both. It need not be exactly the same amount
of whitespace, though. Remember that comments count as whitespace.
These definitions are effectively the same:
#define FOUR (2 + 2)
#define FOUR (2 /* two */ + 2)
but these are not:
#define FOUR ( 2+2 )
#define FOUR (2 * 2)
#define FOUR(score,and,seven,years,ago) (2 + 2)
If a macro is redefined with a definition that is not effectively the same as the old one,
the preprocessor issues a warning and changes the macro to use the new definition. If
the new definition is effectively the same, the redefinition is silently ignored. This allows,
for instance, two different headers to define a common macro. The preprocessor will only
complain if the definitions do not match.
3.9 Directives Within Macro Arguments

Occasionally it is convenient to use preprocessor directives within the arguments of a macro.
The C and C++ standards declare that behavior in these cases is undefined.
Versions of CPP prior to 3.2 would reject such constructs with an error message. This
was the only syntactic difference between normal functions and function-like macros, so
it seemed attractive to remove this limitation, and people would often be surprised that
they could not use macros in this way. Moreover, sometimes people would use conditional
compilation in the argument list to a normal library function like ‘printf’, only to find
that after a library upgrade ‘printf’ had changed to be a function-like macro, and their
code would no longer compile. So from version 3.2 we changed CPP to successfully process
arbitrary directives within macro arguments in exactly the same way as it would have
processed the directive were the function-like macro invocation not present.
If, within a macro invocation, that macro is redefined, then the new definition takes effect
in time for argument pre-expansion, but the original definition is still used for argument
replacement. Here is a pathological example:
#define f(x) x x
f (1
#undef f
#define f 2
f)
which expands to
1 2 1 2
with the semantics described above.
3.10 Macro Pitfalls

In this section we describe some special rules that apply to macros and macro expansion,
and point out certain cases in which the rules have counter-intuitive consequences that you
must watch out for.
3.10.1 Misnesting
When a macro is called with arguments, the arguments are substituted into the macro body
and the result is checked, together with the rest of the input file, for more macro calls. It is
possible to piece together a macro call coming partially from the macro body and partially
from the arguments. For example,
#define twice(x) (2*(x))
#define call_with_1(x) x(1)
call_with_1 (twice)
7→ twice(1)
7→ (2*(1))
Macro definitions do not have to have balanced parentheses. By writing an unbalanced
open parenthesis in a macro body, it is possible to create a macro call that begins inside
the macro body but ends outside of it. For example,
#define strange(file) fprintf (file, "%s %d",
...
strange(stderr) p, 35)
7→ fprintf (stderr, "%s %d", p, 35)
The ability to piece together a macro call can be useful, but the use of unbalanced open
parentheses in a macro body is just confusing, and should be avoided.
3.10.2 Operator Precedence Problems

You may have noticed that in most of the macro definition examples shown above, each
occurrence of a macro argument name had parentheses around it. In addition, another pair
of parentheses usually surround the entire macro definition. Here is why it is best to write
macros that way.
Suppose you define a macro as follows,
#define ceil_div(x, y) (x + y - 1) / y
whose purpose is to divide, rounding up. (One use for this operation is to compute how
many int objects are needed to hold a certain number of char objects.) Then suppose it
is used as follows:
a = ceil_div (b & c, sizeof (int));
7→ a = (b & c + sizeof (int) - 1) / sizeof (int);
This does not do what is intended. The operator-precedence rules of C make it equivalent
to this:
a = (b & (c + sizeof (int) - 1)) / sizeof (int);
What we want is this:
a = ((b & c) + sizeof (int) - 1)) / sizeof (int);
Defining the macro as
#define ceil_div(x, y) ((x) + (y) - 1) / (y)
provides the desired result.
Unintended grouping can result in another way. Consider sizeof ceil_div(1, 2). That
has the appearance of a C expression that would compute the size of the type of ceil_div
(1, 2), but in fact it means something very different. Here is what it expands to:
sizeof ((1) + (2) - 1) / (2)
This would take the size of an integer and divide it by two. The precedence rules have put
the division outside the sizeof when it was intended to be inside.
Parentheses around the entire macro definition prevent such problems. Here, then, is
the recommended way to define ceil_div:
#define ceil_div(x, y) (((x) + (y) - 1) / (y))
3.10.3 Swallowing the Semicolon

Often it is desirable to define a macro that expands into a compound statement. Consider,
for example, the following macro, that advances a pointer (the argument p says where to
find it) across whitespace characters:
#define SKIP_SPACES(p, limit) \
{ char *lim = (limit); \
while (p < lim) { \
if (*p++ != ’ ’) { \
p--; break; }}}
Here backslash-newline is used to split the macro definition, which must be a single logical
line, so that it resembles the way such code would be laid out if not part of a macro
definition.
A call to this macro might be SKIP_SPACES (p, lim). Strictly speaking, the call expands
to a compound statement, which is a complete statement with no need for a semicolon to
end it. However, since it looks like a function call, it minimizes confusion if you can use it
like a function call, writing a semicolon afterward, as in SKIP_SPACES (p, lim);
This can cause trouble before else statements, because the semicolon is actually a null
statement. Suppose you write
if (*p != 0)
SKIP_SPACES (p, lim);
else ...
The presence of two statements—the compound statement and a null statement—in between
the if condition and the else makes invalid C code.
The definition of the macro SKIP_SPACES can be altered to solve this problem, using a
do ... while statement. Here is how:
#define SKIP_SPACES(p, limit) \
do { char *lim = (limit); \
while (p < lim) { \
if (*p++ != ’ ’) { \
p--; break; }}} \
while (0)
Now SKIP_SPACES (p, lim); expands into
do {...} while (0);
which is one statement. The loop executes exactly once; most compilers generate no extra
code for it.
3.10.4 Duplication of Side Effects

Many C programs define a macro min, for “minimum”, like this:
When you use this macro with an argument containing a side effect, as shown here,
next = min (x + y, foo (z));
it expands as follows:
next = ((x + y) < (foo (z)) ? (x + y) : (foo (z)));
where x + y has been substituted for X and foo (z) for Y.
The function foo is used only once in the statement as it appears in the program, but
the expression foo (z) has been substituted twice into the macro expansion. As a result,
foo might be called two times when the statement is executed. If it has side effects or if
it takes a long time to compute, the results might not be what you intended. We say that
min is an unsafe macro.
The best solution to this problem is to define min in a way that computes the value of
foo (z) only once. The C language offers no standard way to do this, but it can be done
with GNU extensions as follows:
#define min(X, Y) \
({ typeof (X) x_ = (X); \
typeof (Y) y_ = (Y); \
(x_ < y_) ? x_ : y_; })
The ‘({ ... })’ notation produces a compound statement that acts as an expression.
Its value is the value of its last statement. This permits us to define local variables and
assign each argument to one. The local variables have underscores after their names to
reduce the risk of conflict with an identifier of wider scope (it is impossible to avoid this
entirely). Now each argument is evaluated exactly once.
If you do not wish to use GNU C extensions, the only solution is to be careful when
using the macro min. For example, you can calculate the value of foo (z), save it in a
variable, and use that variable in min:

...
{
int tem = foo (z);
next = min (x + y, tem);
}
(where we assume that foo returns type int).
3.10.5 Self-Referential Macros

A self-referential macro is one whose name appears in its definition. Recall that all macro
definitions are rescanned for more macros to replace. If the self-reference were considered
a use of the macro, it would produce an infinitely large expansion. To prevent this, the
self-reference is not considered a macro call. It is passed into the preprocessor output
unchanged. Consider an example:
#define foo (4 + foo)
where foo is also a variable in your program.
Following the ordinary rules, each reference to foo will expand into (4 + foo); then this
will be rescanned and will expand into (4 + (4 + foo)); and so on until the computer runs
out of memory.
The self-reference rule cuts this process short after one step, at (4 + foo). Therefore,
this macro definition has the possibly useful effect of causing the program to add 4 to the
value of foo wherever foo is referred to.
In most cases, it is a bad idea to take advantage of this feature. A person reading the
program who sees that foo is a variable will not expect that it is a macro as well. The
reader will come across the identifier foo in the program and think its value should be that
of the variable foo, whereas in fact the value is four greater.
One common, useful use of self-reference is to create a macro which expands to itself. If
you write
#define EPERM EPERM
then the macro EPERM expands to EPERM. Effectively, it is left alone by the preprocessor
whenever it’s used in running text. You can tell that it’s a macro with ‘#ifdef’. You might
do this if you want to define numeric constants with an enum, but have ‘#ifdef’ be true for
each constant.
If a macro x expands to use a macro y, and the expansion of y refers to the macro x,
that is an indirect self-reference of x. x is not expanded in this case either. Thus, if we have
#define x (4 + y)
#define y (2 * x)
then x and y expand as follows:
x 7→ (4 + y)
7 → (4 + (2 * x))
y 7→ (2 * x)
7 → (2 * (4 + y))
Each macro is expanded when it appears in the definition of the other macro, but not when
it indirectly appears in its own definition.
3.10.6 Argument Prescan

Macro arguments are completely macro-expanded before they are substituted into a macro
body, unless they are stringified or pasted with other tokens. After substitution, the en-
tire macro body, including the substituted arguments, is scanned again for macros to be
expanded. The result is that the arguments are scanned twice to expand macro calls in
them.
Most of the time, this has no effect. If the argument contained any macro calls, they are
expanded during the first scan. The result therefore contains no macro calls, so the second
scan does not change it. If the argument were substituted as given, with no prescan, the
single remaining scan would find the same macro calls and produce the same results.
You might expect the double scan to change the results when a self-referential macro is
used in an argument of another macro (see Section 3.10.5 [Self-Referential Macros], page 33):
the self-referential macro would be expanded once in the first scan, and a second time in
the second scan. However, this is not what happens. The self-references that do not expand
in the first scan are marked so that they will not expand in the second scan either.
You might wonder, “Why mention the prescan, if it makes no difference? And why not
skip it and make the preprocessor faster?” The answer is that the prescan does make a
difference in three special cases:
• Nested calls to a macro.
We say that nested calls to a macro occur when a macro’s argument contains a call to
that very macro. For example, if f is a macro that expects one argument, f (f (1))
is a nested pair of calls to f. The desired expansion is made by expanding f (1) and
substituting that into the definition of f. The prescan causes the expected result to
happen. Without the prescan, f (1) itself would be substituted as an argument, and
the inner use of f would appear during the main scan as an indirect self-reference and
would not be expanded.
• Macros that call other macros that stringify or concatenate.
If an argument is stringified or concatenated, the prescan does not occur. If you want
to expand a macro, then stringify or concatenate its expansion, you can do that by
causing one macro to call another macro that does the stringification or concatenation.
For instance, if you have
#define AFTERX(x) X_ ## x
#define XAFTERX(x) AFTERX(x)
#define TABLESIZE 1024
#define BUFSIZE TABLESIZE
then AFTERX(BUFSIZE) expands to X_BUFSIZE, and XAFTERX(BUFSIZE) expands to X_
1024. (Not to X_TABLESIZE. Prescan always does a complete expansion.)
• Macros used in arguments, whose expansions contain unshielded commas.
This can cause a macro expanded on the second scan to be called with the wrong
number of arguments. Here is an example:
#define foo a,b
#define bar(x) lose(x)
#define lose(x) (1 + (x))
We would like bar(foo) to turn into (1 + (foo)), which would then turn into (1 +
(a,b)). Instead, bar(foo) expands into lose(a,b), and you get an error because
Chapter 4: Conditionals 35
lose requires a single argument. In this case, the problem is easily solved by the same
parentheses that ought to be used to prevent misnesting of arithmetic operations:
#define foo (a,b)
or
#define bar(x) lose((x))
The extra pair of parentheses prevents the comma in foo’s definition from being inter-
preted as an argument separator.
3.10.7 Newlines in Arguments

The invocation of a function-like macro can extend over many logical lines. However, in
the present implementation, the entire expansion comes out on one line. Thus line numbers
emitted by the compiler or debugger refer to the line the invocation started on, which might
be different to the line containing the argument causing the problem.
Here is an example illustrating this:
#define ignore_second_arg(a,b,c) a; c
ignore_second_arg (foo (),

ignored (),
syntax error);
The syntax error triggered by the tokens syntax error results in an error message citing
line three—the line of ignore second arg— even though the problematic code comes from
line five.
We consider this a bug, and intend to fix it in the near future.
4 Conditionals
A conditional is a directive that instructs the preprocessor to select whether or not to
include a chunk of code in the final token stream passed to the compiler. Preprocessor
conditionals can test arithmetic expressions, or whether a name is defined as a macro, or
both simultaneously using the special defined operator.
A conditional in the C preprocessor resembles in some ways an if statement in C, but it
is important to understand the difference between them. The condition in an if statement
is tested during the execution of your program. Its purpose is to allow your program to
behave differently from run to run, depending on the data it is operating on. The condition
in a preprocessing conditional directive is tested when your program is compiled. Its purpose
is to allow different code to be included in the program depending on the situation at the
time of compilation.
However, the distinction is becoming less clear. Modern compilers often do test if
statements when a program is compiled, if their conditions are known not to vary at run
time, and eliminate code which can never be executed. If you can count on your compiler
to do this, you may find that your program is more readable if you use if statements with
constant conditions (perhaps determined by macros). Of course, you can only use this to
exclude code, not type definitions or other preprocessing directives, and you can only do it
if the code remains syntactically valid when it is not to be used.
GCC version 3 eliminates this kind of never-executed code even when not optimizing.
Older versions did it only when optimizing.
4.1 Conditional Uses

There are three general reasons to use a conditional.
• A program may need to use different code depending on the machine or operating
system it is to run on. In some cases the code for one operating system may be
erroneous on another operating system; for example, it might refer to data types or
constants that do not exist on the other system. When this happens, it is not enough
to avoid executing the invalid code. Its mere presence will cause the compiler to reject
the program. With a preprocessing conditional, the offending code can be effectively
excised from the program when it is not valid.
• You may want to be able to compile the same source file into two different programs.
One version might make frequent time-consuming consistency checks on its intermedi-
ate data, or print the values of those data for debugging, and the other not.
• A conditional whose condition is always false is one way to exclude code from the
program but keep it as a sort of comment for future reference.
Simple programs that do not need system-specific logic or complex debugging hooks
generally will not need to use preprocessing conditionals.
4.2 Conditional Syntax

A conditional in the C preprocessor begins with a conditional directive: ‘#if’, ‘#ifdef’ or
‘#ifndef’.
4.2.1 Ifdef
The simplest sort of conditional is
#ifdef MACRO
controlled text
#endif /* MACRO */
This block is called a conditional group. controlled text will be included in the output
of the preprocessor if and only if MACRO is defined. We say that the conditional succeeds
if MACRO is defined, fails if it is not.
The controlled text inside of a conditional can include preprocessing directives. They
are executed only if the conditional succeeds. You can nest conditional groups inside other
conditional groups, but they must be completely nested. In other words, ‘#endif’ always
matches the nearest ‘#ifdef’ (or ‘#ifndef’, or ‘#if’). Also, you cannot start a conditional
group in one file and end it in another.
Even if a conditional fails, the controlled text inside it is still run through initial trans-
formations and tokenization. Therefore, it must all be lexically valid C. Normally the only
way this matters is that all comments and string literals inside a failing conditional group
must still be properly ended.
The comment following the ‘#endif’ is not required, but it is a good practice if there
is a lot of controlled text, because it helps people match the ‘#endif’ to the corresponding
‘#ifdef’. Older programs sometimes put MACRO directly after the ‘#endif’ without
enclosing it in a comment. This is invalid code according to the C standard. CPP accepts
it with a warning. It never affects which ‘#ifndef’ the ‘#endif’ matches.
Sometimes you wish to use some code if a macro is not defined. You can do this by
writing ‘#ifndef’ instead of ‘#ifdef’. One common use of ‘#ifndef’ is to include code only
the first time a header file is included. See Section 2.4 [Once-Only Headers], page 10.
Macro definitions can vary between compilations for several reasons. Here are some
samples.
• Some macros are predefined on each kind of machine (see Section 3.7.3 [System-specific
Predefined Macros], page 28). This allows you to provide code specially tuned for a
particular machine.
• System header files define more macros, associated with the features they implement.
You can test these macros with conditionals to avoid using a system feature on a
machine where it is not implemented.
• Macros can be defined or undefined with the ‘-D’ and ‘-U’ command line options when
you compile the program. You can arrange to compile the same source file into two
different programs by choosing a macro name to specify which program you want,
writing conditionals to test whether or how this macro is defined, and then controlling
the state of the macro with command line options, perhaps set in the Makefile. See
Chapter 12 [Invocation], page 52.
• Your program might have a special header file (often called ‘config.h’) that is adjusted
when the program is compiled. It can define or not define macros depending on the
features of the system and the desired capabilities of the program. The adjustment can
be automated by a tool such as autoconf, or done by hand.
4.2.2 If
The ‘#if’ directive allows you to test the value of an arithmetic expression, rather than the
mere existence of one macro. Its syntax is
#if expression
controlled text
#endif /* expression */
expression is a C expression of integer type, subject to stringent restrictions. It may
contain
• Integer constants.
• Character constants, which are interpreted as they would be in normal code.
• Arithmetic operators for addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, bitwise opera-
tions, shifts, comparisons, and logical operations (&& and ||). The latter two obey the
usual short-circuiting rules of standard C.
• Macros. All macros in the expression are expanded before actual computation of the
expression’s value begins.
• Uses of the defined operator, which lets you check whether macros are defined in the
middle of an ‘#if’.
• Identifiers that are not macros, which are all considered to be the number zero. This
allows you to write #if MACRO instead of #ifdef MACRO, if you know that MACRO,
when defined, will always have a nonzero value. Function-like macros used without
their function call parentheses are also treated as zero.
In some contexts this shortcut is undesirable. The ‘-Wundef’ option causes GCC to
warn whenever it encounters an identifier which is not a macro in an ‘#if’.
The preprocessor does not know anything about types in the language. Therefore,
sizeof operators are not recognized in ‘#if’, and neither are enum constants. They will be
taken as identifiers which are not macros, and replaced by zero. In the case of sizeof, this
is likely to cause the expression to be invalid.
The preprocessor calculates the value of expression. It carries out all calculations in the
widest integer type known to the compiler; on most machines supported by GCC this is
64 bits. This is not the same rule as the compiler uses to calculate the value of a constant
expression, and may give different results in some cases. If the value comes out to be
nonzero, the ‘#if’ succeeds and the controlled text is included; otherwise it is skipped.
4.2.3 Defined
The special operator defined is used in ‘#if’ and ‘#elif’ expressions to test whether a cer-
tain name is defined as a macro. defined name and defined (name ) are both expressions
whose value is 1 if name is defined as a macro at the current point in the program, and 0
otherwise. Thus, #if defined MACRO is precisely equivalent to #ifdef MACRO.
defined is useful when you wish to test more than one macro for existence at once. For
example,
#if defined (__vax__) || defined (__ns16000__)
would succeed if either of the names __vax__ or __ns16000__ is defined as a macro.
Conditionals written like this:
#if defined BUFSIZE && BUFSIZE >= 1024
can generally be simplified to just #if BUFSIZE >= 1024, since if BUFSIZE is not defined, it
will be interpreted as having the value zero.
If the defined operator appears as a result of a macro expansion, the C standard says
the behavior is undefined. GNU cpp treats it as a genuine defined operator and evaluates
it normally. It will warn wherever your code uses this feature if you use the command-line
option ‘-pedantic’, since other compilers may handle it differently.
4.2.4 Else
The ‘#else’ directive can be added to a conditional to provide alternative text to be used
if the condition fails. This is what it looks like:
#if expression
text-if-true
#else /* Not expression */
text-if-false
#endif /* Not expression */
If expression is nonzero, the text-if-true is included and the text-if-false is skipped. If
expression is zero, the opposite happens.
You can use ‘#else’ with ‘#ifdef’ and ‘#ifndef’, too.
4.2.5 Elif
One common case of nested conditionals is used to check for more than two possible alter-
natives. For example, you might have
#if X == 1
...
#else /* X != 1 */
#if X == 2
...
#else /* X != 2 */
...
#endif /* X != 2 */
#endif /* X != 1 */
Another conditional directive, ‘#elif’, allows this to be abbreviated as follows:

#if X == 1
...
#elif X == 2
...
#else /* X != 2 and X != 1*/
...
#endif /* X != 2 and X != 1*/
‘#elif’ stands for “else if”. Like ‘#else’, it goes in the middle of a conditional group
and subdivides it; it does not require a matching ‘#endif’ of its own. Like ‘#if’, the ‘#elif’
directive includes an expression to be tested. The text following the ‘#elif’ is processed
only if the original ‘#if’-condition failed and the ‘#elif’ condition succeeds.
More than one ‘#elif’ can go in the same conditional group. Then the text after each
‘#elif’ is processed only if the ‘#elif’ condition succeeds after the original ‘#if’ and all
previous ‘#elif’ directives within it have failed.
‘#else’ is allowed after any number of ‘#elif’ directives, but ‘#elif’ may not follow
‘#else’.
4.3 Deleted Code

If you replace or delete a part of the program but want to keep the old code around for
future reference, you often cannot simply comment it out. Block comments do not nest, so
the first comment inside the old code will end the commenting-out. The probable result is
a flood of syntax errors.
One way to avoid this problem is to use an always-false conditional instead. For instance,
put #if 0 before the deleted code and #endif after it. This works even if the code being
turned off contains conditionals, but they must be entire conditionals (balanced ‘#if’ and
‘#endif’).
Some people use #ifdef notdef instead. This is risky, because notdef might be acci-
dentally defined as a macro, and then the conditional would succeed. #if 0 can be counted
on to fail.
Do not use #if 0 for comments which are not C code. Use a real comment, instead. The
interior of #if 0 must consist of complete tokens; in particular, single-quote characters must
balance. Comments often contain unbalanced single-quote characters (known in English as
apostrophes). These confuse #if 0. They don’t confuse ‘/*’.
Chapter 6: Line Control 40
5 Diagnostics
The directive ‘#error’ causes the preprocessor to report a fatal error. The tokens forming
the rest of the line following ‘#error’ are used as the error message.
You would use ‘#error’ inside of a conditional that detects a combination of parameters
which you know the program does not properly support. For example, if you know that the
program will not run properly on a VAX, you might write
#ifdef __vax__
#error "Won’t work on VAXen. See comments at get_last_object."
#endif
If you have several configuration parameters that must be set up by the installation in
a consistent way, you can use conditionals to detect an inconsistency and report it with
‘#error’. For example,
#if !defined(UNALIGNED_INT_ASM_OP) && defined(DWARF2_DEBUGGING_INFO)
#error "DWARF2_DEBUGGING_INFO requires UNALIGNED_INT_ASM_OP."
#endif
The directive ‘#warning’ is like ‘#error’, but causes the preprocessor to issue a warn-
ing and continue preprocessing. The tokens following ‘#warning’ are used as the warning
message.
You might use ‘#warning’ in obsolete header files, with a message directing the user to
the header file which should be used instead.
Neither ‘#error’ nor ‘#warning’ macro-expands its argument. Internal whitespace se-
quences are each replaced with a single space. The line must consist of complete tokens. It
is wisest to make the argument of these directives be a single string constant; this avoids
problems with apostrophes and the like.
6 Line Control
The C preprocessor informs the C compiler of the location in your source code where each
token came from. Presently, this is just the file name and line number. All the tokens
resulting from macro expansion are reported as having appeared on the line of the source
file where the outermost macro was used. We intend to be more accurate in the future.
If you write a program which generates source code, such as the bison parser generator,
you may want to adjust the preprocessor’s notion of the current file name and line number
by hand. Parts of the output from bison are generated from scratch, other parts come from
a standard parser file. The rest are copied verbatim from bison’s input. You would like
compiler error messages and symbolic debuggers to be able to refer to bison’s input file.
bison or any such program can arrange this by writing ‘#line’ directives into the output
file. ‘#line’ is a directive that specifies the original line number and source file name for
subsequent input in the current preprocessor input file. ‘#line’ has three variants:
#line linenum
linenum is a non-negative decimal integer constant. It specifies the line number
which should be reported for the following line of input. Subsequent lines are
counted from linenum.
Chapter 7: Pragmas 41
#line linenum filename

linenum is the same as for the first form, and has the same effect. In addition,
filename is a string constant. The following line and all subsequent lines are
reported to come from the file it specifies, until something else happens to
change that. filename is interpreted according to the normal rules for a string
constant: backslash escapes are interpreted. This is different from ‘#include’.
Previous versions of CPP did not interpret escapes in ‘#line’; we have changed
it because the standard requires they be interpreted, and most other compilers
do.
#line anything else
anything else is checked for macro calls, which are expanded. The result should
match one of the above two forms.
‘#line’ directives alter the results of the __FILE__ and __LINE__ predefined macros
from that point on. See Section 3.7.1 [Standard Predefined Macros], page 21. They do not
have any effect on ‘#include’’s idea of the directory containing the current file. This is a
change from GCC 2.95. Previously, a file reading
#line 1 "../src/gram.y"
#include "gram.h"
would search for ‘gram.h’ in ‘../src’, then the ‘-I’ chain; the directory containing the
physical source file would not be searched. In GCC 3.0 and later, the ‘#include’ is not
affected by the presence of a ‘#line’ referring to a different directory.
We made this change because the old behavior caused problems when generated source
files were transported between machines. For instance, it is common practice to ship gen-
erated parsers with a source release, so that people building the distribution do not need to
have yacc or Bison installed. These files frequently have ‘#line’ directives referring to the
directory tree of the system where the distribution was created. If GCC tries to search for
headers in those directories, the build is likely to fail.
The new behavior can cause failures too, if the generated file is not in the same directory
as its source and it attempts to include a header which would be visible searching from the
directory containing the source file. However, this problem is easily solved with an additional
‘-I’ switch on the command line. The failures caused by the old semantics could sometimes
be corrected only by editing the generated files, which is difficult and error-prone.
7 Pragmas
The ‘#pragma’ directive is the method specified by the C standard for providing additional
information to the compiler, beyond what is conveyed in the language itself. Three forms
of this directive (commonly known as pragmas) are specified by the 1999 C standard. A C
compiler is free to attach any meaning it likes to other pragmas.
GCC has historically preferred to use extensions to the syntax of the language, such as
__attribute__, for this purpose. However, GCC does define a few pragmas of its own.
These mostly have effects on the entire translation unit or source file.
In GCC version 3, all GNU-defined, supported pragmas have been given a GCC prefix.
This is in line with the STDC prefix on all pragmas defined by C99. For backward com-
patibility, pragmas which were recognized by previous versions are still recognized without
Chapter 7: Pragmas 42
the GCC prefix, but that usage is deprecated. Some older pragmas are deprecated in their
entirety. They are not recognized with the GCC prefix. See Section 11.3 [Obsolete Features],
page 50.
C99 introduces the _Pragma operator. This feature addresses a major problem with
‘#pragma’: being a directive, it cannot be produced as the result of macro expansion.
_Pragma is an operator, much like sizeof or defined, and can be embedded in a macro.
Its syntax is _Pragma (string-literal ), where string-literal can be either a normal or
wide-character string literal. It is destringized, by replacing all ‘\\’ with a single ‘\’ and all
‘\"’ with a ‘"’. The result is then processed as if it had appeared as the right hand side of
a ‘#pragma’ directive. For example,
_Pragma ("GCC dependency \"parse.y\"")
has the same effect as #pragma GCC dependency "parse.y". The same effect could be
achieved using macros, for example
#define DO_PRAGMA(x) _Pragma (#x)
DO_PRAGMA (GCC dependency "parse.y")
The standard is unclear on where a _Pragma operator can appear. The preprocessor
does not accept it within a preprocessing conditional directive like ‘#if’. To be safe, you
are probably best keeping it out of directives other than ‘#define’, and putting it on a line
of its own.
This manual documents the pragmas which are meaningful to the preprocessor itself.
Other pragmas are meaningful to the C or C++ compilers. They are documented in the
GCC manual.
#pragma GCC dependency
#pragma GCC dependency allows you to check the relative dates of the current
file and another file. If the other file is more recent than the current file, a
warning is issued. This is useful if the current file is derived from the other
file, and should be regenerated. The other file is searched for using the normal
include search path. Optional trailing text can be used to give more information
in the warning message.
#pragma GCC dependency "parse.y"
#pragma GCC dependency "/usr/include/time.h" rerun fixincludes
#pragma GCC poison

Sometimes, there is an identifier that you want to remove completely from your
program, and make sure that it never creeps back in. To enforce this, you can
poison the identifier with this pragma. #pragma GCC poison is followed by a
list of identifiers to poison. If any of those identifiers appears anywhere in the
source after the directive, it is a hard error. For example,
#pragma GCC poison printf sprintf fprintf
sprintf(some_string, "hello");
will produce an error.
If a poisoned identifier appears as part of the expansion of a macro which was
defined before the identifier was poisoned, it will not cause an error. This lets
you poison an identifier without worrying about system headers defining macros
that use it.
For example,
Chapter 9: Preprocessor Output 43
#define strrchr rindex

#pragma GCC poison rindex
strrchr(some_string, ’h’);
will not produce an error.
#pragma GCC system_header
This pragma takes no arguments. It causes the rest of the code in the current
file to be treated as if it came from a system header. See Section 2.8 [System
Headers], page 13.
8 Other Directives
The ‘#ident’ directive takes one argument, a string constant. On some systems, that string
constant is copied into a special segment of the object file. On other systems, the directive
is ignored. The ‘#sccs’ directive is a synonym for ‘#ident’.
These directives are not part of the C standard, but they are not official GNU extensions
either. What historical information we have been able to find, suggests they originated with
System V.
Both ‘#ident’ and ‘#sccs’ are deprecated extensions.
The null directive consists of a ‘#’ followed by a newline, with only whitespace (including
comments) in between. A null directive is understood as a preprocessing directive but has
no effect on the preprocessor output. The primary significance of the existence of the null
directive is that an input line consisting of just a ‘#’ will produce no output, rather than a
line of output containing just a ‘#’. Supposedly some old C programs contain such lines.
9 Preprocessor Output
When the C preprocessor is used with the C, C++, or Objective-C compilers, it is integrated
into the compiler and communicates a stream of binary tokens directly to the compiler’s
parser. However, it can also be used in the more conventional standalone mode, where it
produces textual output.
The output from the C preprocessor looks much like the input, except that all prepro-
cessing directive lines have been replaced with blank lines and all comments with spaces.
Long runs of blank lines are discarded.
The ISO standard specifies that it is implementation defined whether a preprocessor
preserves whitespace between tokens, or replaces it with e.g. a single space. In GNU CPP,
whitespace between tokens is collapsed to become a single space, with the exception that
the first token on a non-directive line is preceded with sufficient spaces that it appears in
the same column in the preprocessed output that it appeared in the original source file.
This is so the output is easy to read. See Section 11.4 [Differences from previous versions],
page 51. CPP does not insert any whitespace where there was none in the original source,
except where necessary to prevent an accidental token paste.
Source file name and line number information is conveyed by lines of the form
Chapter 10: Traditional Mode 44
# linenum filename flags

These are called linemarkers. They are inserted as needed into the output (but never within
a string or character constant). They mean that the following line originated in file filename
at line linenum. filename will never contain any non-printing characters; they are replaced
with octal escape sequences.
After the file name comes zero or more flags, which are ‘1’, ‘2’, ‘3’, or ‘4’. If there are
multiple flags, spaces separate them. Here is what the flags mean:
‘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.
As an extension, the preprocessor accepts linemarkers in non-assembler input files. They
are treated like the corresponding ‘#line’ directive, (see Chapter 6 [Line Control], page 40),
except that trailing flags are permitted, and are interpreted with the meanings described
above. If multiple flags are given, they must be in ascending order.
Some directives may be duplicated in the output of the preprocessor. These are ‘#ident’
(always), ‘#pragma’ (only if the preprocessor does not handle the pragma itself), and
‘#define’ and ‘#undef’ (with certain debugging options). If this happens, the ‘#’ of the di-
rective will always be in the first column, and there will be no space between the ‘#’ and the
directive name. If macro expansion happens to generate tokens which might be mistaken
for a duplicated directive, a space will be inserted between the ‘#’ and the directive name.
10 Traditional Mode
Traditional (pre-standard) C preprocessing is rather different from the preprocessing spec-
ified by the standard. When GCC is given the ‘-traditional-cpp’ option, it attempts to
emulate a traditional preprocessor.
GCC versions 3.2 and later only support traditional mode semantics in the preprocessor,
and not in the compiler front ends. This chapter outlines the traditional preprocessor
semantics we implemented.
The implementation does not correspond precisely to the behavior of earlier versions of
GCC, nor to any true traditional preprocessor. After all, inconsistencies among traditional
implementations were a major motivation for C standardization. However, we intend that
it should be compatible with true traditional preprocessors in all ways that actually matter.
10.1 Traditional lexical analysis

The traditional preprocessor does not decompose its input into tokens the same way a
standards-conforming preprocessor does. The input is simply treated as a stream of text
with minimal internal form.
This implementation does not treat trigraphs (see [trigraphs], page 2) specially since they
were an invention of the standards committee. It handles arbitrarily-positioned escaped
newlines properly and splices the lines as you would expect; many traditional preprocessors
did not do this.
The form of horizontal whitespace in the input file is preserved in the output. In partic-
ular, hard tabs remain hard tabs. This can be useful if, for example, you are preprocessing
a Makefile.
Traditional CPP only recognizes C-style block comments, and treats the ‘/*’ sequence
as introducing a comment only if it lies outside quoted text. Quoted text is introduced by
the usual single and double quotes, and also by an initial ‘<’ in a #include directive.
Traditionally, comments are completely removed and are not replaced with a space.
Since a traditional compiler does its own tokenization of the output of the preprocessor,
this means that comments can effectively be used as token paste operators. However,
comments behave like separators for text handled by the preprocessor itself, since it doesn’t
re-lex its input. For example, in
#if foo/**/bar
‘foo’ and ‘bar’ are distinct identifiers and expanded separately if they happen to be macros.
In other words, this directive is equivalent to
#if foo bar
rather than
#if foobar
Generally speaking, in traditional mode an opening quote need not have a matching
closing quote. In particular, a macro may be defined with replacement text that contains
an unmatched quote. Of course, if you attempt to compile preprocessed output containing
an unmatched quote you will get a syntax error.
However, all preprocessing directives other than #define require matching quotes. For
example:
#define m This macro’s fine and has an unmatched quote
"/* This is not a comment. */
/* This is a comment. The following #include directive
is ill-formed. */
#include <stdio.h
Just as for the ISO preprocessor, what would be a closing quote can be escaped with a
backslash to prevent the quoted text from closing.
10.2 Traditional macros

The major difference between traditional and ISO macros is that the former expand to
text rather than to a token sequence. CPP removes all leading and trailing horizontal
whitespace from a macro’s replacement text before storing it, but preserves the form of
internal whitespace.
One consequence is that it is legitimate for the replacement text to contain an unmatched
quote (see Section 10.1 [Traditional lexical analysis], page 44). An unclosed string or char-
acter constant continues into the text following the macro call. Similarly, the text at the
end of a macro’s expansion can run together with the text after the macro invocation to
produce a single token.
Normally comments are removed from the replacement text after the macro is expanded,
but if the ‘-CC’ option is passed on the command line comments are preserved. (In fact,
the current implementation removes comments even before saving the macro replacement
text, but it careful to do it in such a way that the observed effect is identical even in the
function-like macro case.)
The ISO stringification operator ‘#’ and token paste operator ‘##’ have no special mean-
ing. As explained later, an effect similar to these operators can be obtained in a different
way. Macro names that are embedded in quotes, either from the main file or after macro
replacement, do not expand.
CPP replaces an unquoted object-like macro name with its replacement text, and then
rescans it for further macros to replace. Unlike standard macro expansion, traditional
macro expansion has no provision to prevent recursion. If an object-like macro appears
unquoted in its replacement text, it will be replaced again during the rescan pass, and so on
ad infinitum. GCC detects when it is expanding recursive macros, emits an error message,
and continues after the offending macro invocation.
#define PLUS +
#define INC(x) PLUS+x
INC(foo);
7→ ++foo;
Function-like macros are similar in form but quite different in behavior to their ISO
counterparts. Their arguments are contained within parentheses, are comma-separated, and
can cross physical lines. Commas within nested parentheses are not treated as argument
separators. Similarly, a quote in an argument cannot be left unclosed; a following comma or
parenthesis that comes before the closing quote is treated like any other character. There
is no facility for handling variadic macros.
This implementation removes all comments from macro arguments, unless the ‘-C’ option
is given. The form of all other horizontal whitespace in arguments is preserved, including
leading and trailing whitespace. In particular
f( )
is treated as an invocation of the macro ‘f’ with a single argument consisting of a single
space. If you want to invoke a function-like macro that takes no arguments, you must not
leave any whitespace between the parentheses.
If a macro argument crosses a new line, the new line is replaced with a space when
forming the argument. If the previous line contained an unterminated quote, the following
line inherits the quoted state.
Traditional preprocessors replace parameters in the replacement text with their argu-
ments regardless of whether the parameters are within quotes or not. This provides a way
to stringize arguments. For example
#define str(x) "x"
str(/* A comment */some text )
7→ "some text "
Note that the comment is removed, but that the trailing space is preserved. Here is an
example of using a comment to effect token pasting.
#define suffix(x) foo_/**/x
suffix(bar)
7→ foo_bar
10.3 Traditional miscellany

Here are some things to be aware of when using the traditional preprocessor.
• Preprocessing directives are recognized only when their leading ‘#’ appears in the first
column. There can be no whitespace between the beginning of the line and the ‘#’, but
whitespace can follow the ‘#’.
• A true traditional C preprocessor does not recognize ‘#error’ or ‘#pragma’, and may
not recognize ‘#elif’. CPP supports all the directives in traditional mode that it
supports in ISO mode, including extensions, with the exception that the effects of
‘#pragma GCC poison’ are undefined.
• STDC is not defined.
• If you use digraphs the behavior is undefined.
• If a line that looks like a directive appears within macro arguments, the behavior is
undefined.
10.4 Traditional warnings

You can request warnings about features that did not exist, or worked differently, in tra-
ditional C with the ‘-Wtraditional’ option. GCC does not warn about features of ISO
C which you must use when you are using a conforming compiler, such as the ‘#’ and ‘##’
operators.
Presently ‘-Wtraditional’ warns about:
• Macro parameters that appear within string literals in the macro body. In traditional
C macro replacement takes place within string literals, but does not in ISO C.
• In traditional C, some preprocessor directives did not exist. Traditional preprocessors
would only consider a line to be a directive if the ‘#’ appeared in column 1 on the line.
Therefore ‘-Wtraditional’ warns about directives that traditional C understands but
would ignore because the ‘#’ does not appear as the first character on the line. It
also suggests you hide directives like ‘#pragma’ not understood by traditional C by
indenting them. Some traditional implementations would not recognize ‘#elif’, so it
suggests avoiding it altogether.
• A function-like macro that appears without an argument list. In some traditional
preprocessors this was an error. In ISO C it merely means that the macro is not
expanded.
• The unary plus operator. This did not exist in traditional C.
• The ‘U’ and ‘LL’ integer constant suffixes, which were not available in traditional C.
(Traditional C does support the ‘L’ suffix for simple long integer constants.) You are not
warned about uses of these suffixes in macros defined in system headers. For instance,
UINT_MAX may well be defined as 4294967295U, but you will not be warned if you use
UINT_MAX.
You can usually avoid the warning, and the related warning about constants which
are so large that they are unsigned, by writing the integer constant in question in
hexadecimal, with no U suffix. Take care, though, because this gives the wrong result
in exotic cases.
Chapter 11: Implementation Details 48
11 Implementation Details
Here we document details of how the preprocessor’s implementation affects its user-visible
behavior. You should try to avoid undue reliance on behavior described here, as it is possible
that it will change subtly in future implementations.
Also documented here are obsolete features and changes from previous versions of CPP.
11.1 Implementation-defined behavior

This is how CPP behaves in all the cases which the C standard describes as implementation-
defined. This term means that the implementation is free to do what it likes, but must
document its choice and stick to it.
• The mapping of physical source file multi-byte characters to the execution character
set.
The input character set can be specified using the ‘-finput-charset’ option, while
the execution character set may be controlled using the ‘-fexec-charset’ and
‘-fwide-exec-charset’ options.
• Identifier characters.
The C and C++ standards allow identifiers to be composed of ‘_’ and the alphanumeric
characters. C++ and C99 also allow universal character names, and C99 further permits
implementation-defined characters. GCC currently only permits universal character
names if ‘-fextended-identifiers’ is used, because the implementation of universal
character names in identifiers is experimental.
GCC allows the ‘$’ character in identifiers as an extension for most targets. This is
true regardless of the ‘std=’ switch, since this extension cannot conflict with standards-
conforming programs. When preprocessing assembler, however, dollars are not identi-
fier characters by default.
Currently the targets that by default do not permit ‘$’ are AVR, IP2K, MMIX, MIPS
Irix 3, ARM aout, and PowerPC targets for the AIX operating system.
You can override the default with ‘-fdollars-in-identifiers’ or
‘fno-dollars-in-identifiers’. See [fdollars-in-identifiers], page 59.
• Non-empty sequences of whitespace characters.
In textual output, each whitespace sequence is collapsed to a single space. For aesthetic
reasons, the first token on each non-directive line of output is preceded with sufficient
spaces that it appears in the same column as it did in the original source file.
• The numeric value of character constants in preprocessor expressions.
The preprocessor and compiler interpret character constants in the same way; i.e. escape
sequences such as ‘\a’ are given the values they would have on the target machine.
The compiler values a multi-character character constant a character at a time, shifting
the previous value left by the number of bits per target character, and then or-ing in
the bit-pattern of the new character truncated to the width of a target character. The
final bit-pattern is given type int, and is therefore signed, regardless of whether single
characters are signed or not (a slight change from versions 3.1 and earlier of GCC). If
there are more characters in the constant than would fit in the target int the compiler
issues a warning, and the excess leading characters are ignored.
For example, ’ab’ for a target with an 8-bit char would be interpreted as
‘(int) ((unsigned char) ’a’ * 256 + (unsigned char) ’b’)’, and ’\234a’ as
‘(int) ((unsigned char) ’\234’ * 256 + (unsigned char) ’a’)’.
• Source file inclusion.
For a discussion on how the preprocessor locates header files, Section 2.2 [Include
Operation], page 8.
• Interpretation of the filename resulting from a macro-expanded ‘#include’ directive.
See Section 2.6 [Computed Includes], page 11.
• Treatment of a ‘#pragma’ directive that after macro-expansion results in a standard
pragma.
No macro expansion occurs on any ‘#pragma’ directive line, so the question does not
arise.
Note that GCC does not yet implement any of the standard pragmas.
11.2 Implementation limits

CPP has a small number of internal limits. This section lists the limits which the C standard
requires to be no lower than some minimum, and all the others known. It is intended that
there should be as few limits as possible. If you encounter an undocumented or inconvenient
limit, please report that as a bug. See Section “Reporting Bugs” in Using the GNU Compiler
Collection (GCC).
Where we say something is limited only by available memory, that means that internal
data structures impose no intrinsic limit, and space is allocated with malloc or equivalent.
The actual limit will therefore depend on many things, such as the size of other things
allocated by the compiler at the same time, the amount of memory consumed by other
processes on the same computer, etc.
• Nesting levels of ‘#include’ files.
We impose an arbitrary limit of 200 levels, to avoid runaway recursion. The standard
requires at least 15 levels.
• Nesting levels of conditional inclusion.
The C standard mandates this be at least 63. CPP is limited only by available memory.
• Levels of parenthesized expressions within a full expression.
The C standard requires this to be at least 63. In preprocessor conditional expressions,
it is limited only by available memory.
• Significant initial characters in an identifier or macro name.
The preprocessor treats all characters as significant. The C standard requires only that
the first 63 be significant.
• Number of macros simultaneously defined in a single translation unit.
The standard requires at least 4095 be possible. CPP is limited only by available
memory.
• Number of parameters in a macro definition and arguments in a macro call.
We allow USHRT_MAX, which is no smaller than 65,535. The minimum required by the
standard is 127.
• Number of characters on a logical source line.

The C standard requires a minimum of 4096 be permitted. CPP places no limits on
this, but you may get incorrect column numbers reported in diagnostics for lines longer
than 65,535 characters.
• Maximum size of a source file.
The standard does not specify any lower limit on the maximum size of a source file.
GNU cpp maps files into memory, so it is limited by the available address space. This
is generally at least two gigabytes. Depending on the operating system, the size of
physical memory may or may not be a limitation.
11.3 Obsolete Features

CPP has some features which are present mainly for compatibility with older programs.
We discourage their use in new code. In some cases, we plan to remove the feature in a
future version of GCC.
11.3.1 Assertions
Assertions are a deprecated alternative to macros in writing conditionals to test what sort
of computer or system the compiled program will run on. Assertions are usually predefined,
but you can define them with preprocessing directives or command-line options.
Assertions were intended to provide a more systematic way to describe the compiler’s
target system. However, in practice they are just as unpredictable as the system-specific
predefined macros. In addition, they are not part of any standard, and only a few compilers
support them. Therefore, the use of assertions is less portable than the use of system-specific
predefined macros. We recommend you do not use them at all.
An assertion looks like this:
#predicate (answer )
predicate must be a single identifier. answer can be any sequence of tokens; all characters are
significant except for leading and trailing whitespace, and differences in internal whitespace
sequences are ignored. (This is similar to the rules governing macro redefinition.) Thus, (x
+ y) is different from (x+y) but equivalent to ( x + y ). Parentheses do not nest inside an
answer.
To test an assertion, you write it in an ‘#if’. For example, this conditional succeeds if
either vax or ns16000 has been asserted as an answer for machine.
#if #machine (vax) || #machine (ns16000)
You can test whether any answer is asserted for a predicate by omitting the answer in the
conditional:
#if #machine
Assertions are made with the ‘#assert’ directive. Its sole argument is the assertion to
make, without the leading ‘#’ that identifies assertions in conditionals.
#assert predicate (answer )
You may make several assertions with the same predicate and different answers. Subsequent
assertions do not override previous ones for the same predicate. All the answers for any
given predicate are simultaneously true.
Assertions can be canceled with the ‘#unassert’ directive. It has the same syntax as
‘#assert’. In that form it cancels only the answer which was specified on the ‘#unassert’
line; other answers for that predicate remain true. You can cancel an entire predicate by
leaving out the answer:
#unassert predicate
In either form, if no such assertion has been made, ‘#unassert’ has no effect.
You can also make or cancel assertions using command line options. See Chapter 12
11.4 Differences from previous versions

This section details behavior which has changed from previous versions of CPP. We do not
plan to change it again in the near future, but we do not promise not to, either.
The “previous versions” discussed here are 2.95 and before. The behavior of GCC 3.0 is
mostly the same as the behavior of the widely used 2.96 and 2.97 development snapshots.
Where there are differences, they generally represent bugs in the snapshots.
• -I- deprecated
This option has been deprecated in 4.0. ‘-iquote’ is meant to replace the need for this
option.
• Order of evaluation of ‘#’ and ‘##’ operators
The standard does not specify the order of evaluation of a chain of ‘##’ operators, nor
whether ‘#’ is evaluated before, after, or at the same time as ‘##’. You should therefore
not write any code which depends on any specific ordering. It is possible to guarantee
an ordering, if you need one, by suitable use of nested macros.
An example of where this might matter is pasting the arguments ‘1’, ‘e’ and ‘-2’. This
would be fine for left-to-right pasting, but right-to-left pasting would produce an invalid
token ‘e-2’.
GCC 3.0 evaluates ‘#’ and ‘##’ at the same time and strictly left to right. Older versions
evaluated all ‘#’ operators first, then all ‘##’ operators, in an unreliable order.
• The form of whitespace between tokens in preprocessor output
See Chapter 9 [Preprocessor Output], page 43, for the current textual format. This
is also the format used by stringification. Normally, the preprocessor communicates
tokens directly to the compiler’s parser, and whitespace does not come up at all.
Older versions of GCC preserved all whitespace provided by the user and inserted lots
more whitespace of their own, because they could not accurately predict when extra
spaces were needed to prevent accidental token pasting.
• Optional argument when invoking rest argument macros
As an extension, GCC permits you to omit the variable arguments entirely when you
use a variable argument macro. This is forbidden by the 1999 C standard, and will
provoke a pedantic warning with GCC 3.0. Previous versions accepted it silently.
• ‘##’ swallowing preceding text in rest argument macros
Formerly, in a macro expansion, if ‘##’ appeared before a variable arguments parameter,
and the set of tokens specified for that argument in the macro invocation was empty,
Chapter 12: Invocation 52
previous versions of CPP would back up and remove the preceding sequence of non-
whitespace characters (not the preceding token). This extension is in direct conflict
with the 1999 C standard and has been drastically pared back.
In the current version of the preprocessor, if ‘##’ appears between a comma and a vari-
able arguments parameter, and the variable argument is omitted entirely, the comma
will be removed from the expansion. If the variable argument is empty, or the token
before ‘##’ is not a comma, then ‘##’ behaves as a normal token paste.
• ‘#line’ and ‘#include’
The ‘#line’ directive used to change GCC’s notion of the “directory containing the
current file”, used by ‘#include’ with a double-quoted header file name. In 3.0 and
later, it does not. See Chapter 6 [Line Control], page 40, for further explanation.
• Syntax of ‘#line’
In GCC 2.95 and previous, the string constant argument to ‘#line’ was treated the
same way as the argument to ‘#include’: backslash escapes were not honored, and the
string ended at the second ‘"’. This is not compliant with the C standard. In GCC
3.0, an attempt was made to correct the behavior, so that the string was treated as a
real string constant, but it turned out to be buggy. In 3.1, the bugs have been fixed.
(We are not fixing the bugs in 3.0 because they affect relatively few people and the fix
is quite invasive.)
12 Invocation
Most often when you use the C preprocessor you will not have to invoke it explicitly: the
C compiler will do so automatically. However, the preprocessor is sometimes useful on its
own. All the options listed here are also acceptable to the C compiler and have the same
meaning, except that the C compiler has different rules for specifying the output file.
Note: Whether you use the preprocessor by way of gcc or cpp, the compiler driver is run
first. This program’s purpose is to translate your command into invocations of the programs
that do the actual work. Their command line interfaces are similar but not identical to the
documented interface, and may change without notice.
The C preprocessor expects two file names as arguments, infile and outfile. The prepro-
cessor reads infile together with any other files it specifies with ‘#include’. All the output
generated by the combined input files is written in outfile.
Either infile or outfile may be ‘-’, which as infile means to read from standard input
and as outfile means to write to standard output. Also, if either file is omitted, it means
the same as if ‘-’ had been specified for that file.
Unless otherwise noted, or the option ends in ‘=’, all options which take an argument may
have that argument appear either immediately after the option, or with a space between
option and argument: ‘-Ifoo’ and ‘-I foo’ have the same effect.
Many options have multi-letter names; therefore multiple single-letter options may not
be grouped: ‘-dM’ is very different from ‘-d -M’.
-D name Predefine name as a macro, with definition 1.
-D name =definition
The contents of definition are tokenized and processed as if they appeared dur-
ing translation phase three in a ‘#define’ directive. In particular, the definition
will be truncated by embedded newline characters.
If you are invoking the preprocessor from a shell or shell-like program you may
need to use the shell’s quoting syntax to protect characters such as spaces that
have a meaning in the shell syntax.
If you wish to define a function-like macro on the command line, write its
argument list with surrounding parentheses before the equals sign (if any).
Parentheses are meaningful to most shells, so you will need to quote the option.
With sh and csh, ‘-D’name (args...)=definition ’’ works.
‘-D’ and ‘-U’ options are processed in the order they are given on the command
line. All ‘-imacros file ’ and ‘-include file ’ options are processed after all
‘-D’ and ‘-U’ options.
-U name Cancel any previous definition of name, either built in or provided with a ‘-D’
option.
-undef Do not predefine any system-specific or GCC-specific macros. The standard pre-
defined macros remain defined. See Section 3.7.1 [Standard Predefined Macros],
page 21.
-I dir Add the directory dir to the list of directories to be searched for header files.
See Section 2.3 [Search Path], page 9. Directories named by ‘-I’ are searched
before the standard system include directories. If the directory dir is a standard
system include directory, the option is ignored to ensure that the default search
order for system directories and the special treatment of system headers are not
defeated (see Section 2.8 [System Headers], page 13) . If dir begins with =, then
the = will be replaced by the sysroot prefix; see ‘--sysroot’ and ‘-isysroot’.
-o file Write output to file. This is the same as specifying file as the second non-option
argument to cpp. gcc has a different interpretation of a second non-option
argument, so you must use ‘-o’ to specify the output file.
-Wall Turns on all optional warnings which are desirable for normal code. At present
this is ‘-Wcomment’, ‘-Wtrigraphs’, ‘-Wmultichar’ and a warning about integer
promotion causing a change of sign in #if expressions. Note that many of the
preprocessor’s warnings are on by default and have no options to control them.
-Wcomment
-Wcomments
Warn whenever a comment-start sequence ‘/*’ appears in a ‘/*’ comment, or
whenever a backslash-newline appears in a ‘//’ comment. (Both forms have
the same effect.)
-Wtrigraphs
Most trigraphs in comments cannot affect the meaning of the program. How-
ever, a trigraph that would form an escaped newline (‘??/’ at the end of a line)
can, by changing where the comment begins or ends. Therefore, only trigraphs
that would form escaped newlines produce warnings inside a comment.
This option is implied by ‘-Wall’. If ‘-Wall’ is not given, this option

is still enabled unless trigraphs are enabled. To get trigraph conversion
without warnings, but get the other ‘-Wall’ warnings, use ‘-trigraphs -Wall
-Wno-trigraphs’.
-Wtraditional
Warn about certain constructs that behave differently in traditional and ISO C.
Also warn about ISO C constructs that have no traditional C equivalent, and
problematic constructs which should be avoided. See Chapter 10 [Traditional
Mode], page 44.
-Wundef Warn whenever an identifier which is not a macro is encountered in an ‘#if’
directive, outside of ‘defined’. Such identifiers are replaced with zero.
-Wunused-macros
Warn about macros defined in the main file that are unused. A macro is used if
it is expanded or tested for existence at least once. The preprocessor will also
warn if the macro has not been used at the time it is redefined or undefined.
Built-in macros, macros defined on the command line, and macros defined in
include files are not warned about.
Note: If a macro is actually used, but only used in skipped conditional blocks,
then CPP will report it as unused. To avoid the warning in such a case, you
might improve the scope of the macro’s definition by, for example, moving it
into the first skipped block. Alternatively, you could provide a dummy use with
something like:
#if defined the_macro_causing_the_warning
#endif
-Wendif-labels
Warn whenever an ‘#else’ or an ‘#endif’ are followed by text. This usually
happens in code of the form
#if FOO
...
#else FOO
...
#endif FOO
The second and third FOO should be in comments, but often are not in older
programs. This warning is on by default.
-Werror Make all warnings into hard errors. Source code which triggers warnings will
be rejected.
-Wsystem-headers
Issue warnings for code in system headers. These are normally unhelpful in
finding bugs in your own code, therefore suppressed. If you are responsible for
the system library, you may want to see them.
-w Suppress all warnings, including those which GNU CPP issues by default.
-pedantic
Issue all the mandatory diagnostics listed in the C standard. Some of them are
left out by default, since they trigger frequently on harmless code.
-pedantic-errors
Issue all the mandatory diagnostics, and make all mandatory diagnostics
into errors. This includes mandatory diagnostics that GCC issues without
‘-pedantic’ but treats as warnings.
-M Instead of outputting the result of preprocessing, output a rule suitable for make
describing the dependencies of the main source file. The preprocessor outputs
one make rule containing the object file name for that source file, a colon, and
the names of all the included files, including those coming from ‘-include’ or
‘-imacros’ command line options.
Unless specified explicitly (with ‘-MT’ or ‘-MQ’), the object file name consists of
the name of the source file with any suffix replaced with object file suffix and
with any leading directory parts removed. If there are many included files then
the rule is split into several lines using ‘\’-newline. The rule has no commands.
This option does not suppress the preprocessor’s debug output, such as ‘-dM’.
To avoid mixing such debug output with the dependency rules you should ex-
plicitly specify the dependency output file with ‘-MF’, or use an environment
variable like DEPENDENCIES_OUTPUT (see Chapter 13 [Environment Variables],
page 62). Debug output will still be sent to the regular output stream as normal.
Passing ‘-M’ to the driver implies ‘-E’, and suppresses warnings with an implicit
‘-w’.
-MM Like ‘-M’ but do not mention header files that are found in system header
directories, nor header files that are included, directly or indirectly, from such
a header.
This implies that the choice of angle brackets or double quotes in an ‘#include’
directive does not in itself determine whether that header will appear in ‘-MM’
dependency output. This is a slight change in semantics from GCC versions
3.0 and earlier.
-MF file When used with ‘-M’ or ‘-MM’, specifies a file to write the dependencies to. If
no ‘-MF’ switch is given the preprocessor sends the rules to the same place it
would have sent preprocessed output.
When used with the driver options ‘-MD’ or ‘-MMD’, ‘-MF’ overrides the default
dependency output file.
-MG In conjunction with an option such as ‘-M’ requesting dependency generation,
‘-MG’ assumes missing header files are generated files and adds them to the
dependency list without raising an error. The dependency filename is taken
directly from the #include directive without prepending any path. ‘-MG’ also
suppresses preprocessed output, as a missing header file renders this useless.
This feature is used in automatic updating of makefiles.
-MP This option instructs CPP to add a phony target for each dependency other
than the main file, causing each to depend on nothing. These dummy rules
work around errors make gives if you remove header files without updating the
‘Makefile’ to match.
This is typical output:
test.o: test.c test.h
test.h:
-MT target
Change the target of the rule emitted by dependency generation. By default
CPP takes the name of the main input file, deletes any directory components
and any file suffix such as ‘.c’, and appends the platform’s usual object suffix.
The result is the target.
An ‘-MT’ option will set the target to be exactly the string you specify. If you
want multiple targets, you can specify them as a single argument to ‘-MT’, or
use multiple ‘-MT’ options.
For example, ‘-MT ’$(objpfx)foo.o’’ might give
$(objpfx)foo.o: foo.c
-MQ target
Same as ‘-MT’, but it quotes any characters which are special to Make.
‘-MQ ’$(objpfx)foo.o’’ gives
$$(objpfx)foo.o: foo.c
The default target is automatically quoted, as if it were given with ‘-MQ’.
-MD ‘-MD’ is equivalent to ‘-M -MF file ’, except that ‘-E’ is not implied. The driver
determines file based on whether an ‘-o’ option is given. If it is, the driver uses
its argument but with a suffix of ‘.d’, otherwise it takes the name of the input
file, removes any directory components and suffix, and applies a ‘.d’ suffix.
If ‘-MD’ is used in conjunction with ‘-E’, any ‘-o’ switch is understood to specify
the dependency output file (see [-MF], page 55), but if used without ‘-E’, each
‘-o’ is understood to specify a target object file.
Since ‘-E’ is not implied, ‘-MD’ can be used to generate a dependency output
file as a side-effect of the compilation process.
-MMD Like ‘-MD’ except mention only user header files, not system header files.
-x c
-x c++
-x objective-c
-x assembler-with-cpp
Specify the source language: C, C++, Objective-C, or assembly. This has noth-
ing to do with standards conformance or extensions; it merely selects which
base syntax to expect. If you give none of these options, cpp will deduce the
language from the extension of the source file: ‘.c’, ‘.cc’, ‘.m’, or ‘.S’. Some
other common extensions for C++ and assembly are also recognized. If cpp does
not recognize the extension, it will treat the file as C; this is the most generic
mode.
Note: Previous versions of cpp accepted a ‘-lang’ option which selected both
the language and the standards conformance level. This option has been re-
moved, because it conflicts with the ‘-l’ option.
-std=standard
-ansi Specify the standard to which the code should conform. Currently CPP knows
about C and C++ standards; others may be added in the future.
standard may be one of:
iso9899:1990
c89 The ISO C standard from 1990. ‘c89’ is the customary shorthand
for this version of the standard.
The ‘-ansi’ option is equivalent to ‘-std=c89’.
iso9899:199409
The 1990 C standard, as amended in 1994.
iso9899:1999
c99
iso9899:199x
c9x The revised ISO C standard, published in December 1999. Before
publication, this was known as C9X.
gnu89 The 1990 C standard plus GNU extensions. This is the default.
gnu99
gnu9x The 1999 C standard plus GNU extensions.
c++98 The 1998 ISO C++ standard plus amendments.
gnu++98 The same as ‘-std=c++98’ plus GNU extensions. This is the default
for C++ code.
-I- Split the include path. Any directories specified with ‘-I’ options before ‘-I-’
are searched only for headers requested with #include "file "; they are not
searched for #include <file >. If additional directories are specified with ‘-I’
options after the ‘-I-’, those directories are searched for all ‘#include’ direc-
tives.
In addition, ‘-I-’ inhibits the use of the directory of the current file directory as
the first search directory for #include "file ". See Section 2.3 [Search Path],
page 9. This option has been deprecated.
-nostdinc
Do not search the standard system directories for header files. Only the direc-
tories you have specified with ‘-I’ options (and the directory of the current file,
if appropriate) are searched.
-nostdinc++
Do not search for header files in the C++-specific standard directories, but do
still search the other standard directories. (This option is used when building
the C++ library.)
-include file
Process file as if #include "file" appeared as the first line of the primary
source file. However, the first directory searched for file is the preprocessor’s
working directory instead of the directory containing the main source file. If
not found there, it is searched for in the remainder of the #include "..."
search chain as normal.
If multiple ‘-include’ options are given, the files are included in the order they
appear on the command line.
-imacros file
Exactly like ‘-include’, except that any output produced by scanning file is
thrown away. Macros it defines remain defined. This allows you to acquire all
the macros from a header without also processing its declarations.
All files specified by ‘-imacros’ are processed before all files specified by
‘-include’.
-idirafter dir
Search dir for header files, but do it after all directories specified with ‘-I’
and the standard system directories have been exhausted. dir is treated as a
system include directory. If dir begins with =, then the = will be replaced by
the sysroot prefix; see ‘--sysroot’ and ‘-isysroot’.
-iprefix prefix
Specify prefix as the prefix for subsequent ‘-iwithprefix’ options. If the prefix
represents a directory, you should include the final ‘/’.
-iwithprefix dir
-iwithprefixbefore dir
Append dir to the prefix specified previously with ‘-iprefix’, and add the
resulting directory to the include search path. ‘-iwithprefixbefore’ puts it
in the same place ‘-I’ would; ‘-iwithprefix’ puts it where ‘-idirafter’ would.
-isysroot dir
This option is like the ‘--sysroot’ option, but applies only to header files. See
the ‘--sysroot’ option for more information.
-imultilib dir
Use dir as a subdirectory of the directory containing target-specific C++ headers.
-isystem dir
Search dir for header files, after all directories specified by ‘-I’ but before the
standard system directories. Mark it as a system directory, so that it gets the
same special treatment as is applied to the standard system directories. See
Section 2.8 [System Headers], page 13. If dir begins with =, then the = will be
replaced by the sysroot prefix; see ‘--sysroot’ and ‘-isysroot’.
-iquote dir
Search dir only for header files requested with #include "file "; they are not
searched for #include <file >, before all directories specified by ‘-I’ and before
the standard system directories. See Section 2.3 [Search Path], page 9. If dir
begins with =, then the = will be replaced by the sysroot prefix; see ‘--sysroot’
and ‘-isysroot’.
-fdirectives-only
When preprocessing, handle directives, but do not expand macros.
The option’s behavior depends on the ‘-E’ and ‘-fpreprocessed’ options.

With ‘-E’, preprocessing is limited to the handling of directives such as #define,
#ifdef, and #error. Other preprocessor operations, such as macro expansion
and trigraph conversion are not performed. In addition, the ‘-dD’ option is
implicitly enabled.
With ‘-fpreprocessed’, predefinition of command line and most builtin macros
is disabled. Macros such as __LINE__, which are contextually dependent, are
handled normally. This enables compilation of files previously preprocessed
with -E -fdirectives-only.
With both ‘-E’ and ‘-fpreprocessed’, the rules for ‘-fpreprocessed’ take
precedence. This enables full preprocessing of files previously preprocessed
with -E -fdirectives-only.
-fdollars-in-identifiers
Accept ‘$’ in identifiers. See [Identifier characters], page 48.
-fextended-identifiers
Accept universal character names in identifiers. This option is experimental; in
a future version of GCC, it will be enabled by default for C99 and C++.
-fpreprocessed
Indicate to the preprocessor that the input file has already been preprocessed.
This suppresses things like macro expansion, trigraph conversion, escaped new-
line splicing, and processing of most directives. The preprocessor still recognizes
and removes comments, so that you can pass a file preprocessed with ‘-C’ to the
compiler without problems. In this mode the integrated preprocessor is little
more than a tokenizer for the front ends.
‘-fpreprocessed’ is implicit if the input file has one of the extensions ‘.i’,
‘.ii’ or ‘.mi’. These are the extensions that GCC uses for preprocessed files
created by ‘-save-temps’.
-ftabstop=width
Set the distance between tab stops. This helps the preprocessor report correct
column numbers in warnings or errors, even if tabs appear on the line. If the
value is less than 1 or greater than 100, the option is ignored. The default is 8.
-fexec-charset=charset
Set the execution character set, used for string and character constants. The
default is UTF-8. charset can be any encoding supported by the system’s iconv
library routine.
-fwide-exec-charset=charset
Set the wide execution character set, used for wide string and character con-
stants. The default is UTF-32 or UTF-16, whichever corresponds to the width
of wchar_t. As with ‘-fexec-charset’, charset can be any encoding supported
by the system’s iconv library routine; however, you will have problems with
encodings that do not fit exactly in wchar_t.
-finput-charset=charset
Set the input character set, used for translation from the character set of the
input file to the source character set used by GCC. If the locale does not specify,
or GCC cannot get this information from the locale, the default is UTF-8. This
can be overridden by either the locale or this command line option. Currently
the command line option takes precedence if there’s a conflict. charset can be
any encoding supported by the system’s iconv library routine.
-fworking-directory
Enable generation of linemarkers in the preprocessor output that will let the
compiler know the current working directory at the time of preprocessing.
When this option is enabled, the preprocessor will emit, after the initial line-
marker, a second linemarker with the current working directory followed by
two slashes. GCC will use this directory, when it’s present in the prepro-
cessed input, as the directory emitted as the current working directory in some
debugging information formats. This option is implicitly enabled if debug-
ging information is enabled, but this can be inhibited with the negated form
‘-fno-working-directory’. If the ‘-P’ flag is present in the command line,
this option has no effect, since no #line directives are emitted whatsoever.
-fno-show-column
Do not print column numbers in diagnostics. This may be necessary if diag-
nostics are being scanned by a program that does not understand the column
numbers, such as dejagnu.
-A predicate =answer
Make an assertion with the predicate predicate and answer answer. This form is
preferred to the older form ‘-A predicate (answer )’, which is still supported,
because it does not use shell special characters. See Section 11.3 [Obsolete
Features], page 50.
-A -predicate =answer
Cancel an assertion with the predicate predicate and answer answer.
-dCHARS CHARS is a sequence of one or more of the following characters, and must
not be preceded by a space. Other characters are interpreted by the compiler
proper, or reserved for future versions of GCC, and so are silently ignored. If
you specify characters whose behavior conflicts, the result is undefined.
‘M’ Instead of the normal output, generate a list of ‘#define’ directives
for all the macros defined during the execution of the preprocessor,
including predefined macros. This gives you a way of finding out
what is predefined in your version of the preprocessor. Assuming
you have no file ‘foo.h’, the command
touch foo.h; cpp -dM foo.h
will show all the predefined macros.
If you use ‘-dM’ without the ‘-E’ option, ‘-dM’ is interpreted as
a synonym for ‘-fdump-rtl-mach’. See hundefinedi [Debugging
Options], page hundefinedi.
‘D’ Like ‘M’ except in two respects: it does not include the predefined
macros, and it outputs both the ‘#define’ directives and the result
of preprocessing. Both kinds of output go to the standard output
file.
‘N’ Like ‘D’, but emit only the macro names, not their expansions.
‘I’ Output ‘#include’ directives in addition to the result of prepro-
cessing.
‘U’ Like ‘D’ except that only macros that are expanded, or whose de-
finedness is tested in preprocessor directives, are output; the output
is delayed until the use or test of the macro; and ‘#undef’ directives
are also output for macros tested but undefined at the time.
-P Inhibit generation of linemarkers in the output from the preprocessor. This
might be useful when running the preprocessor on something that is not C code,
and will be sent to a program which might be confused by the linemarkers. See
Chapter 9 [Preprocessor Output], page 43.
-C Do not discard comments. All comments are passed through to the output file,
except for comments in processed directives, which are deleted along with the
directive.
You should be prepared for side effects when using ‘-C’; it causes the prepro-
cessor to treat comments as tokens in their own right. For example, comments
appearing at the start of what would be a directive line have the effect of turn-
ing that line into an ordinary source line, since the first token on the line is no
longer a ‘#’.
-CC Do not discard comments, including during macro expansion. This is like ‘-C’,
except that comments contained within macros are also passed through to the
output file where the macro is expanded.
In addition to the side-effects of the ‘-C’ option, the ‘-CC’ option causes all
C++-style comments inside a macro to be converted to C-style comments. This
is to prevent later use of that macro from inadvertently commenting out the
remainder of the source line.
The ‘-CC’ option is generally used to support lint comments.
-traditional-cpp
Try to imitate the behavior of old-fashioned C preprocessors, as opposed to ISO
C preprocessors. See Chapter 10 [Traditional Mode], page 44.
-trigraphs
Process trigraph sequences. See Section 1.2 [Initial processing], page 2.
-remap Enable special code to work around file systems which only permit very short
file names, such as MS-DOS.
--help
--target-help
Print text describing all the command line options instead of preprocessing
anything.
-v Verbose mode. Print out GNU CPP’s version number at the beginning of
execution, and report the final form of the include path.
-H Print the name of each header file used, in addition to other normal activities.
Each name is indented to show how deep in the ‘#include’ stack it is. Precom-
Chapter 13: Environment Variables 62
piled header files are also printed, even if they are found to be invalid; an invalid
precompiled header file is printed with ‘...x’ and a valid one with ‘...!’ .
-version
--version
Print out GNU CPP’s version number. With one dash, proceed to preprocess
as normal. With two dashes, exit immediately.
13 Environment Variables
This section describes the environment variables that affect how CPP operates. You can use
them to specify directories or prefixes to use when searching for include files, or to control
dependency output.
Note that you can also specify places to search using options such as ‘-I’, and control
dependency output with options like ‘-M’ (see Chapter 12 [Invocation], page 52). These take
precedence over environment variables, which in turn take precedence over the configuration
of GCC.
CPATH
C_INCLUDE_PATH
CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH
OBJC_INCLUDE_PATH
Each variable’s value is a list of directories separated by a special character,
much like PATH, in which to look for header files. The special character, PATH_
SEPARATOR, is target-dependent and determined at GCC build time. For Mi-
crosoft Windows-based targets it is a semicolon, and for almost all other targets
it is a colon.
CPATH specifies a list of directories to be searched as if specified with ‘-I’, but
after any paths given with ‘-I’ options on the command line. This environment
variable is used regardless of which language is being preprocessed.
The remaining environment variables apply only when preprocessing the par-
ticular language indicated. Each specifies a list of directories to be searched as
if specified with ‘-isystem’, but after any paths given with ‘-isystem’ options
on the command line.
In all these variables, an empty element instructs the compiler to search its
current working directory. Empty elements can appear at the beginning or end
of a path. For instance, if the value of CPATH is :/special/include, that has
the same effect as ‘-I. -I/special/include’.
See also Section 2.3 [Search Path], page 9.
DEPENDENCIES_OUTPUT
If this variable is set, its value specifies how to output dependencies for Make
based on the non-system header files processed by the compiler. System header
files are ignored in the dependency output.
The value of DEPENDENCIES_OUTPUT can be just a file name, in which case the
Make rules are written to that file, guessing the target name from the source
Chapter 13: Environment Variables 63
file name. Or the value can have the form ‘file target ’, in which case the
rules are written to file file using target as the target name.
In other words, this environment variable is equivalent to combining the options
‘-MM’ and ‘-MF’ (see Chapter 12 [Invocation], page 52), with an optional ‘-MT’
switch too.
SUNPRO_DEPENDENCIES
This variable is the same as DEPENDENCIES_OUTPUT (see above), except that
system header files are not ignored, so it implies ‘-M’ rather than ‘-MM’. However,
the dependence on the main input file is omitted. See Chapter 12 [Invocation],
page 52.
GNU Free Documentation License 64
GNU Free Documentation License

Version 1.2, November 2002
Copyright 2000,2001,2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
c
51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies

of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
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or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;
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Option Index 71
Index of Directives
#assert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 #include . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
#define . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 #include_next . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
#elif . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 #line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
#else . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 #pragma GCC dependency. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
#endif . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
#pragma GCC poison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
#error . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
#pragma GCC system_header . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13, 43
#ident . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
#if . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 #sccs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
#ifdef . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 #unassert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
#ifndef . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 #undef . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
#import . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 #warning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Option Index
CPP’s command line options and environment variables are indexed here without any initial
‘-’ or ‘--’.
A H
A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 H . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
ansi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 help . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
C I
C.............................................. 61 I.............................................. 53
C_INCLUDE_PATH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 I- . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
CPATH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 idirafter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 imacros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
imultilib . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
include . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
D iprefix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
D.............................................. 52 iquote . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
dD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 isysroot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
DEPENDENCIES_OUTPUT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 isystem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
dI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 iwithprefix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
dM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 iwithprefixbefore. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
dN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
dU . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
M
F M.............................................. 55
MD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
fdirectives-only . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
MF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
fdollars-in-identifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
MG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
fexec-charset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
MM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
fextended-identifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
MMD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
finput-charset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
MP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
fno-show-column . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
MQ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
fno-working-directory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
MT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
fpreprocessed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
ftabstop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
fwide-exec-charset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 N
fworking-directory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
nostdinc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Option Index 72
nostdinc++. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 U
U . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
O undef . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
o . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
OBJC_INCLUDE_PATH. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 V
v . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
P version . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
P . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
pedantic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
pedantic-errors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 W
w.............................................. 54
Wall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
R Wcomment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
remap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Wcomments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Wendif-labels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
Werror . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
S Wsystem-headers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
std= . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Wtraditional . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
SUNPRO_DEPENDENCIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Wtrigraphs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Wundef . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
Wunused-macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
T
target-help . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
traditional-cpp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 X
trigraphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 x . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Concept Index 73
Concept Index
# environment variables. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
‘#’ operator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 expansion of arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
‘##’ operator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
F
FDL, GNU Free Documentation License . . . . . . . 64
_Pragma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 function-like macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
A G
alternative tokens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 grouping options. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 guard macro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
arguments in macro definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
assertions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
assertions, canceling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 H
header file . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
header file names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
B
backslash-newline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
block comments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
I
identifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
implementation limits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
C implementation-defined behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
C++ named operators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 including just once . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
character constants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 invocation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
character set, execution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 iso646.h . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
character set, input . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
character set, wide execution. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
command line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 L
commenting out code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 line comments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
comments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 line control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
common predefined macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 line endings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
computed includes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 linemarkers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
concatenation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
conditional group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
conditionals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 M
continued lines. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 macro argument expansion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
controlling macro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 macro arguments and directives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
macros in include . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
macros with arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
D macros with variable arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
defined . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 make . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
dependencies for make as output . . . . . . . . . . . 62, 63 manifest constants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
dependencies, make . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
diagnostic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
differences from previous versions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 N
digraphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 named operators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
directive line. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 newlines in macro arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
directive name . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 null directive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
directives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
E O
empty macro arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 object-like macro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Concept Index 74
options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 semicolons (after macro calls) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

options, grouping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 side effects (in macro arguments) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
other tokens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 standard predefined macros. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
output format . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 string constants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
overriding a header file . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 string literals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
stringification. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
symbolic constants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
P system header files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7, 13
parentheses in macro bodies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 system-specific predefined macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
pitfalls of macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
predefined macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 T
predefined macros, system-specific . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
predicates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 testing predicates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
preprocessing directives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 token concatenation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
preprocessing numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 token pasting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
preprocessing tokens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 tokens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
prescan of macro arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 trigraphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
problems with macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
punctuators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
U
undefining macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
R unsafe macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
redefining macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
repeated inclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 V
reporting errors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 variable number of arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
reporting warnings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 variadic macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
reserved namespace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
W
S wrapper #ifndef . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
self-reference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 wrapper headers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

The C Preprocessor: Richard M. Stallman, Zachary Weinberg

Uploaded by

The C Preprocessor: Richard M. Stallman, Zachary Weinberg

Uploaded by

The C Preprocessor

For gcc version 4.4.3

Richard M. Stallman, Zachary Weinberg

GNU Free Documentation License . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

1.1 Character sets

1.2 Initial processing

It is safe to put line comments inside block comments, or vice versa.

// line comment /* contains block comment */

1.4 The preprocessing language

2.1 Include Syntax

2.2 Include Operation

puts (test ());

2.3 Search Path

2.4 Once-Only Headers

the entire file

2.5 Alternatives to Wrapper #ifndef

2.6 Computed Includes

#define HEADER "a\"b"

2.7 Wrapper Headers

The use of ‘#include_next’ can lead to great confusion. We recommend it be used

2.8 System Headers

3.1 Object-like Macros

Now TABLESIZE expands (in two stages) to 37.

3.2 Function-like Macros

3.3 Macro Arguments

min(, b) 7→ (( ) < (b) ? ( ) : (b))

min() error macro "min" requires 2 arguments, but only 1 given

Consider a C program that interprets named commands. There probably needs to be a

struct command commands[] =

struct command commands[] =

3.6 Variadic Macros

3.7 Predefined Macros

3.7.1 Standard Predefined Macros

3.7.2 Common Predefined Macros

/* Test for GCC > 3.2.0 */

3.7.3 System-specific Predefined Macros

3.7.4 C++ Named Operators

3.8 Undefining and Redefining Macros

3.9 Directives Within Macro Arguments

3.10 Macro Pitfalls

3.10.2 Operator Precedence Problems

3.10.3 Swallowing the Semicolon

3.10.4 Duplication of Side Effects

#define min(X, Y) ((X) < (Y) ? (X) : (Y))

3.10.5 Self-Referential Macros

3.10.6 Argument Prescan

3.10.7 Newlines in Arguments

ignore_second_arg (foo (),

4.1 Conditional Uses

4.2 Conditional Syntax

Another conditional directive, ‘#elif’, allows this to be abbreviated as follows:

4.3 Deleted Code

#line linenum filename

#pragma GCC poison

#define strrchr rindex

# linenum filename flags

10.1 Traditional lexical analysis

10.2 Traditional macros

10.3 Traditional miscellany

10.4 Traditional warnings

11.1 Implementation-defined behavior

11.2 Implementation limits

• Number of characters on a logical source line.

11.3 Obsolete Features

11.4 Differences from previous versions

This option is implied by ‘-Wall’. If ‘-Wall’ is not given, this option

test.o: test.c test.h

The option’s behavior depends on the ‘-E’ and ‘-fpreprocessed’ options.

GNU Free Documentation License

Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies

ADDENDUM: How to use this License for your documents

options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 semicolons (after macro calls) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

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