follows an indented set of `variable = value` lines.
The basic example above declares a new rule named `cc`, along with the
-command to run. (In the context of a rule, the `command` variable is
-special and defines the command to run. A full list of special
-variables is provided in <<ref_rule,the reference>>.)
-
-Within the context of a rule, three additional special variables are
-available: `$in` expands to the list of input files (`foo.c`) and
-`$out` to the output file (`foo.o`) for the command. For use with
-`$rspfile_content`, there is also `$in_newline`, which is the same as
-`$in`, except that multiple inputs are separated by `\n`, rather than
-spaces.
-
+command to run. In the context of a rule, the `command` variable
+defines the command to run, `$in` expands to the list of
+input files (`foo.c`), and `$out` to the output files (`foo.o`) for the
+command. A full list of special variables is provided in
+<<ref_rule,the reference>>.
Build statements
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
rebuilt if the command line changes; and secondly, they are not
cleaned by default.
+`in`:: the shell-quoted space-separated list of files provided as
+ inputs to the build line referencing this `rule`. (`$in` is provided
+ solely for convenience; if you need some subset or variant of this
+ list of files, just construct a new variable with that list and use
+ that instead.)
+
+`in_newline`:: the same as `$in` except that multiple inputs are
+ separated by newlines rather than spaces. (For use with
+ `$rspfile_content`; this works around a bug in the MSVC linker where
+ it uses a fixed-size buffer for processing input.)
+
+`out`:: the shell-quoted space-separated list of files provided as
+ outputs to the build line referencing this `rule`.
+
`restat`:: if present, causes Ninja to re-stat the command's outputs
after execution of the command. Each output whose modification time
the command did not change will be treated as though it had never
build myapp.exe: link a.obj b.obj [possibly many other .obj files]
----
-Finally, the special `$in` and `$out` variables expand to the
-shell-quoted space-separated list of files provided to the `build`
-line referencing this `rule`.
-
[[ref_dependencies]]
Build dependencies
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~