Windows – Examples of compiling win32 api c programs (through command line) on windows

ccompilationtccwindows

Attempting to do something very simple – compile basic win 32 c programs through windows cmd. This is something I should be able to do myself, but I am just so stuck here..

I keep stumbling into weird problems, vague errors. I dunno whether I should go into details.
Using tcc ( tiny c compiler)

One simple hellowin.c example from a book required winmm.lib. How do I import it ? can someone give me the exact command for gcc/tcc /any command line compiler for windows(except cygwin) ? I did try various options after reading help , but it kept giving me a can't find stupid error.
a sample from platform sdk that I tried to compile gave a – winnt.h "( expected" error. this after a #define _M_IX86 . what it means ?
any general guide for compiling c programs for windows(win32 api) through command line ? . explaining what all should be #defined ..etc..

I have googled a lot but most of the c compiling guidelines for win32 programs focus on vb .I wanna do it manually , on the command line.

Thanks

Best Answer

If I create a new project using Visual Studio it #defines the following preprocessor symbols using compiler command-line options:

WIN32
_WINDOWS
one of either _DEBUG or NDEBUG
UNICODE and _UNICODE (although the Windows headers and libraries also support non-Unicode-enabled applications, if your compiler doesn't support Unicode).

http://bellard.org/tcc/tcc-doc.html says "For usage on Windows, see also tcc-win32.txt".

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Windows – How to you find and replace text in a file using the Windows command-line environment

A lot of the answers here helped point me in the right direction, however none were suitable for me, so I am posting my solution.

I have Windows 7, which comes with PowerShell built-in. Here is the script I used to find/replace all instances of text in a file:

powershell -Command "(gc myFile.txt) -replace 'foo', 'bar' | Out-File -encoding ASCII myFile.txt"

To explain it:

powershell starts up powershell.exe, which is included in Windows 7
-Command "... " is a command line arg for powershell.exe containing the command to run
(gc myFile.txt) reads the content of myFile.txt (gc is short for the Get-Content command)
-replace 'foo', 'bar' simply runs the replace command to replace foo with bar
| Out-File myFile.txt pipes the output to the file myFile.txt
-encoding ASCII prevents transcribing the output file to unicode, as the comments point out

Powershell.exe should be part of your PATH statement already, but if not you can add it. The location of it on my machine is C:\WINDOWS\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0

Update
Apparently modern windows systems have PowerShell built in allowing you to access this directly using

(Get-Content myFile.txt) -replace 'foo', 'bar' | Out-File -encoding ASCII myFile.txt

Windows – n equivalent of ‘which’ on the Windows command line?

Windows Server 2003 and later (i.e. anything after Windows XP 32 bit) provide the where.exe program which does some of what which does, though it matches all types of files, not just executable commands. (It does not match built-in shell commands like cd.) It will even accept wildcards, so where nt* finds all files in your %PATH% and current directory whose names start with nt.

Try where /? for help.

Note that Windows PowerShell defines where as an alias for the Where-Object cmdlet, so if you want where.exe, you need to type the full name instead of omitting the .exe extension.

Best Answer

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Windows – How to you find and replace text in a file using the Windows command-line environment

Windows – n equivalent of ‘which’ on the Windows command line?

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