What are these unfamiliar lines in the C preprocessed file?

Question

This is an output of the GNU cpp on a Hello World program in C. I am wondering what do these lines mean? # Number Header_File_Location [Numbers]

# 1 "hello.c"
# 1 "<built-in>"
# 1 "<command-line>"
# 1 "/usr/include/stdc-predef.h" 1 3 4
# 1 "<command-line>" 2
# 1 "hello.c"
# 1 "/usr/include/stdio.h" 1 3 4
# 27 "/usr/include/stdio.h" 3 4
# 1 "/usr/include/features.h" 1 3 4
# 374 "/usr/include/features.h" 3 4
# 1 "/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/sys/cdefs.h" 1 3 4
# 385 "/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/sys/cdefs.h" 3 4
# 1 "/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/bits/wordsize.h" 1 3 4
# 386 "/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/sys/cdefs.h" 2 3 4
# 375 "/usr/include/features.h" 2 3 4
# 398 "/usr/include/features.h" 3 4
# 1 "/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/gnu/stubs.h" 1 3 4
# 10 "/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/gnu/stubs.h" 3 4
# 1 "/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/gnu/stubs-64.h" 1 3 4
# 11 "/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/gnu/stubs.h" 2 3 4
# 399 "/usr/include/features.h" 2 3 4
# 28 "/usr/include/stdio.h" 2 3 4





# 1 "/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.8/include/stddef.h" 1 3 4
# 212 "/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.8/include/stddef.h" 3 4
typedef long unsigned int size_t;
# 34 "/usr/include/stdio.h" 2 3 4

# 1 "/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/bits/types.h" 1 3 4
# 27 "/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/bits/types.h" 3 4
# 1 "/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/bits/wordsize.h" 1 3 4
# 28 "/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/bits/types.h" 2 3 4


typedef unsigned char __u_char;
typedef unsigned short int __u_short;
typedef unsigned int __u_int;
typedef unsigned long int __u_long;

Are these some kind of dependencies? If yes, then on what? Line numbers?

Answer 1

From gcc documentation:

Source file name and line number information is conveyed by lines of the form

 # linenum filename flags

These are called linemarkers. They are inserted as needed into the output (but never within a string or character constant). They mean that the following line originated in file filename at line linenum. filename will never contain any non-printing characters; they are replaced with octal escape sequences.

After the file name comes zero or more flags, which are ‘1’, ‘2’, ‘3’, or ‘4’. If there are multiple flags, spaces separate them. Here is what the flags mean:

‘1’ This indicates the start of a new file.

‘2’ This indicates returning to a file (after having included another file).

‘3’ This indicates that the following text comes from a system header file, so certain warnings should be suppressed.

‘4’ This indicates that the following text should be treated as being wrapped in an implicit extern "C" block.