The characters are formatted in a manner similar to a portion of the make utility command line: options are preceded by <hyphen-minus> characters and <blank>-separated as described in XBD Section 12.2 (on page 215). The macro=value macro definition operands can also be included. The difference between the contents of MAKEFLAGS and the make utility command line is that the contents of the variable shall not be subjected to the word expansions (see Section 2.6, on page 2468) associated with parsing the command line values.

The characters are formatted in a manner similar to the use of the make utility in shell commands: options are preceded by <hyphen-minus> characters and <blank>-separated as described in XBD Section 12.2 (on page 215). The macro=value macro definition operands can also be included. The difference between the contents of MAKEFLAGS and the use of the make utility in shell commands is that the contents of the variable shall not be subjected to the word expansions (see Section 2.6, on page 2468) associated with parsing shell command lines.