Re: windres and cmd.exe command line limit

[Jonathan Liu]

On 8/05/2012 7:17 PM, Joe Burmeister wrote:
> I've been doing some QT work with MinGW and run up against that
> windres.exe uses popen, which on Windows calls cmd.exe, which only has a
> 8192 character limit.
>
> Building something in QT (which sometimes has masses of defines) in
> Windows with MinGW, was failing with "command line is too long".
> I felt the correct thing was that windres.exe didn't have this limit on
> Windows, so I've implemented an alternative popen for Windows with a
> larger character limit of 32768.
>
> Include the attached file in your build and in resrc.c change:
>
>
> /*#if defined (_WIN32) && ! defined (__CYGWIN__)
> #define popen _popen* *
> #define pclose _pclose
> #endif*/
>
> to:
>
> */#if defined (_WIN32) && ! defined (__CYGWIN__)
> extern FILE *win_popen_biglimit(const char *command,const char *mode );
extern FILE *win_popen_biglimit(const char *command, const char *mode);
> extern int win_pclose_biglimit(FILE *stream);
#undef popen
> #define popen win_popen_biglimit
#undef pclose
> #define pclose win_pclose_biglimit
> #endif/
> *
>
> Of course solve this how ever you want, but this is the direction I
> think it should go. This can "just work" better than it is. It would be
> better if cmd.exe didn't have this low limit, but it does and I doubt MS
> are going to fix it anytime soon and even if they did, it wouldn't help
> the people running or targeting the existing version of Windows.

Some builds of MinGW have POSIX threads support so popen and pclose are 
already defined and need to be undef-ed first (see above).

The patch unfortunately breaks reading from standard input.
If you start windres without any arguments from a command prompt after 
building with the patch applied, it shows the following error:

windres: can't open file `error:': Invalid argument
windres: preprocessing failed.

Regards,
Jonathan