In page 8 of The C Preprocessor version 10.0.1 we have the following statement:
#include "file"This variant is used for header files of your own program. It searches for a file named
filefirst in the directory containing the current file, then in the quote directories and then the same directories used for<file>. You can prepend directories to the list of quote directories with the‘-iquote’option.
What is meant by "then in the quote directories"?
The documentation says:
You can prepend directories to the list of quote directories with the ‘-iquote’ option.
Thus, "quote directories" are those directories that have been passed as arguments using the ‘-iquote’ option 1. The documentation for the option says:
-iquote dir
Search dir only for header files requested with "#include " file ""; they are not searched for "#include < file >", before all directories specified by -I and before the standard system directories. If dir begins with "=", then the "=" will be replaced by the sysroot prefix; see --sysroot and -isysroot.
1 And in theory, from some other source. I don't know of any other documented source for quote dirs; no default list appears to be documented. I assume the list is empty by default.