This construct is available
only in targets and dependencies, not in commands! Most programs that you
might use in commands do not support this syntax and cannot act directly
on archive members. Only ar
and other programs specifically designed to operate on archives can do
so. Therefore, valid commands to update an archive member target probably
must use ar.
For instance, this rule says to create a member, ‘hack.o’,
in archive, ‘foolib’,
by copying the file, ‘hack.o’
as in the following.
The previous statement is
equivalent to the following statement.
You can also use shell-style wildcards in an archive member reference. See Using wildcard characters in file names. For example, ‘foolib(*.o)’ expands to all existing members of the ‘foolib’ archive whose names end in ‘.o’; perhaps ‘foolib(hack.o) foolib(kludge.o)’.