windres
may be used to manipulate Windows resources.
Warning:
windres
is not always built as part of the binary utilities, since it is only useful for Windows targets.
windres [options] [input-file] [output-file]
windres
reads resources from an input file and copies them into
an output file. Either file may be in one of three formats:
rc
A text format read by the Resource Compiler.
res
A binary format generated by the Resource Compiler.
coff
A COFF object or executable.
The exact description of these different formats is available in documentation from Microsoft.
When windres
converts from the rc
format to the res
format, it is acting like the Windows Resource Compiler. When
windres
converts from the res
format to the coff
format, it is acting like the Windows CVTRES
program.
When windres
generates an rc
file, the output is similar
but not identical to the format expected for the input. When an input
rc
file refers to an external filename, an output rc
file
will instead include the file contents.
If the input or output format is not specified, windres
will
guess based on the file name, or, for the input file, the file contents.
A file with an extension of .rc will be treated as an rc
file, a file with an extension of .res will be treated as a
res
file, and a file with an extension of .o or
.exe will be treated as a coff
file.
If no output file is specified, windres
will print the resources
in rc
format to standard output.
The normal use is for you to write an rc
file, use windres
to convert it to a COFF object file, and then link the COFF file into
your application. This will make the resources described in the
rc
file available to Windows.
-i filename
--input filename
The name of the input file. If this option is not used, then
windres
will use the first non-option argument as the input file
name. If there are no non-option arguments, then windres
will
read from standard input. windres
can not read a COFF file from
standard input.
-o filename
--output filename
The name of the output file. If this option is not used, then
windres
will use the first non-option argument, after any used
for the input file name, as the output file name. If there is no
non-option argument, then windres
will write to standard output.
windres
can not write a COFF file to standard output. Note,
for compatibility with rc
the option -fo is also
accepted, but its use is not recommended.
-J format
--input-format format
The input format to read. format may be ‘res’, ‘rc’, or
‘coff’. If no input format is specified, windres
will
guess, as described above.
-O format
--output-format format
The output format to generate. format may be ‘res’,
‘rc’, or ‘coff’. If no output format is specified,
windres
will guess, as described above.
-F target
--target target
Specify the BFD format to use for a COFF file as input or output. This
is a BFD target name; you can use the --help option to see a list
of supported targets. Normally windres
will use the default
format, which is the first one listed by the --help option.
Target Selection.
--preprocessor program
When windres
reads an rc
file, it runs it through the C
preprocessor first. This option may be used to specify the preprocessor
to use. The default preprocessor is gcc
.
--preprocessor-arg option
When windres
reads an rc
file, it runs it through
the C preprocessor first. This option may be used to specify additional
text to be passed to preprocessor on its command line.
This option can be used multiple times to add multiple options to the
preprocessor command line.
If the --preprocessor option has not been specified then a
default set of preprocessor arguments will be used, with any
--preprocessor-arg options being placed after them on the
command line. These default arguments are -E
,
-xc-header
and -DRC_INVOKED
.
-I directory
--include-dir directory
Specify an include directory to use when reading an rc
file.
windres
will pass this to the preprocessor as an -I
option. windres
will also search this directory when looking for
files named in the rc
file. If the argument passed to this command
matches any of the supported formats (as described in the -J
option), it will issue a deprecation warning, and behave just like the
-J option. New programs should not use this behaviour. If a
directory happens to match a format, simple prefix it with ‘./’
to disable the backward compatibility.
-D target
--define sym[=val]
Specify a -D option to pass to the preprocessor when reading an
rc
file.
-U target
--undefine sym
Specify a -U option to pass to the preprocessor when reading an
rc
file.
-r
Ignored for compatibility with rc.
-v
Enable verbose mode. This tells you what the preprocessor is if you didn’t specify one.
-c val
--codepage val
Specify the default codepage to use when reading an rc
file.
val should be a hexadecimal prefixed by ‘0x’ or decimal
codepage code. The valid range is from zero up to 0xffff, but the
validity of the codepage is host and configuration dependent.
-l val
--language val
Specify the default language to use when reading an rc
file.
val should be a hexadecimal language code. The low eight bits are
the language, and the high eight bits are the sublanguage.
--use-temp-file
Use a temporary file to instead of using popen to read the output of the preprocessor. Use this option if the popen implementation is buggy on the host (eg., certain non-English language versions of Windows 95 and Windows 98 are known to have buggy popen where the output will instead go the console).
--no-use-temp-file
Use popen, not a temporary file, to read the output of the preprocessor. This is the default behaviour.
-h
--help
Prints a usage summary.
-V
--version
Prints the version number for windres
.
--yydebug
If windres
is compiled with YYDEBUG
defined as 1
,
this will turn on parser debugging.