sed "s/XConsole/#XConsole/" Makefile | make -f -: This will comment out the XConsole variable in the Makefile and pipe the output of sed (the modified Makefile) directly to the make program. This is an alternate and more efficient way to direct the output to a file and tell make to use that alternate file. The XConsole build is disabled because it can't be build yet because we don't have X installed yet.