What are cflags? [closed]

I have some experience with Gentoo, so I know the compiler meaning of CFLAGS, but when I try to configure :

# ./bootstrap&&./configure&&make clean&&make&&make install
...
checking for winscard.h... no
configure: error: winscard.h not found, install pcsc-lite, or use PCSC_CFLAGS=... ./configure

I do have pcsc though(repo version):

# dpkg -l pcscd
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name Version Architecture Description
+++-======================================-========================-========================-==================================================================================
ii pcscd 1.8.10-1ubuntu1 amd64 Middleware to access a smart card using PC/SC (daemon side)

I don't want to install pcsc_lite though, because I have had a lot of trouble getting my smartcard reader to work and I don't really want to go through that again. That's why I'm interested in CFLAGS. Is there a way that I can point the ./compile to pcscd?

1 Answer

Quoted from wikipedia

CFLAGS are the name of environment variables or of Makefile variables that can be set to specify additional switches to be passed to a compiler in the process of building computer software.

These variables are usually set inside a Makefile and are then appended to the command line when the compiler is invoked. If they are not specified in the Makefile, then they will be read from the environment, if present.

you can easily install it from repository not from source code

sudo apt-get install libpcsclite-dev