General Form

The general form of an entry in a description file is:

target1 [target2 ...] :[:] [dependent1 ...] [; commands] 
[# ...] [ \t commands] [# ...] 
 .  .  .  

Items inside brackets can be omitted and targets and dependents are strings of letters, digits, periods, and slashes. Shell metacharacters such as * and ? are expanded when the commands are evaluated. Commands can appear either after a semicolon on a dependency line or on lines beginning with a tab (denoted above as \t) immediately following a dependency line. A command is any string of characters not including #, except when # is in quotes.