That's on an msys setup targeting x86_64-w64-mingw32. $ strip --version GNU strip (GNU Binutils) 2.25 Copyright (C) 2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This program is free software; you may redistribute it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 or (at your option) any later version. This program has absolutely no warranty. $ strip --strip-unneeded foo.dll strip.exe: unable to rename 'foo.dll'; reason: File exists This works for binutils-2.24!