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comment by thundara
thundara  ·  4329 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Calling all Unix/OS X Gurus!

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.