I'm smart enough to know what the dollar sign means; my problem is I'm too stupid to know what everything else means so I always start by copy-pasting everything I see and working my way backwards. the Ubuntu issue is another thing. I may mess about with it when I get some time. In the meantime, I've capitulated and devoted my debug time to finding a better solution. Four pages buried on Google, I succeeded. Thanks sincerely for your help. I shall not abuse it when I don't need it.
Well, for future learning's sake: "which" finds the location of the its argument, turning "gcc" (The compiler) into "/usr/bin/gcc", "cd" changes the directory, "tar" extracts the archive, and "make" instructs the system to follow the commands laid out in the Makefile, describing how to build and install the package. The "&&"s between each command just serve to conditionally execute them only in the case that the previous command succeeded.