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26.1 Preprocessing Overview

GNU C performs preprocessing on each line of a C program as the first stage of compilation. Preprocessing operates on a line only when it contains a preprocessing directive or uses a macro—all other lines pass through preprocessing unchanged.

Here are some jobs that preprocessing does. The rest of this chapter gives the details.

• Inclusion of header files. These are files (usually containing declarations and macro definitions) that can be substituted into your program.
• Macro expansion. You can define macros, which are abbreviations for arbitrary fragments of C code. Preprocessing replaces the macros with their definitions. Some macros are automatically predefined.
• 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 intermediate file that is then compiled, you can use line control to inform the compiler where each source line originally came from.
• Compilation control. #pragma and _Pragma invoke some special compiler features in how to handle certain constructs.
• Diagnostics. You can detect problems at compile time and issue errors or warnings.

Except for expansion of predefined macros, all these operations happen only if you use preprocessing directives to request them.

Preprocessing does not recognize the operators of the C language itself, outside of the operand of the #if directive (see The #if directive). However, it supports three preprocessing operators of its own: # (see Stringification), ## (see Concatenation) and defined (see The #if directive).