Makefile: what does $@~ mean?

Question

I am working on an old makefile that contains the following snippet to generate a shared library:

lib$(LIBNAME).so.$(SOLIBREV): $(OBJS)
    $(RM) $@~
    @SONAME=`echo $@ | sed 's/\.[^\.]*$$//'`; set -x; \
    $(CC) -o ./$@~ -shared -Wl,-soname,$$SONAME $(OBJS) $(SOEXTRALIBS) -lc;
    $(MV) $@~ $@
    $(MV) $@ lib$(LIBNAME).so

Now I need to modify that. I know that $@ specifies the target but what meaning does the tilde in "$@~" have?

By the way SOLIBREV stands for so-library-revision.

Answer 1

It doesn't mean anything special. It's just $@ followed by a literal ~ . A ~ suffix on filenames is often used for temporary files, so this recipe is using a temporary file named after the target but with the extra ~ suffix.