This special feature comes into play when you write a dependency whose name is of the form, -lname. (You can tell something strange is going on here because the dependency is normally the name of a file, and the file name of the library looks like lib name.a, not like -lname.)
When a dependencys name
has the form -lname,
make
handles it specially by searching for the file libname.a
in the current directory, in directories specified by matching vpath
search paths and the VPATH
search path, and then in the directories /lib,
/usr/lib,
and prefix/lib
(normally, /usr/local/lib).
Use the following example, for instance.
This would cause the command, cc foo.c /usr/lib/libcurses.a -o foo, to execute when foo is older than foo.c or /usr/lib/libcurses.a.