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1.8 C Preprocessor Output

The output from the C preprocessor looks much like the input, except that all preprocessing directive lines have been replaced with blank lines and all comments with spaces. Whitespace within a line is not altered; however, unless `-traditional' is used, spaces may be inserted into the expansions of macro calls to prevent tokens from being concatenated.

Source file name and line number information is conveyed by lines of the form

# linenum filename flags

which are inserted as needed into the middle of the input (but never within a string or character constant). Such a line means that the following line originated in file filename at line linenum.

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 C.