Date: Fri, 28 Nov 1997 09:11:05 -0800 (PST)
Message-Id: <199711281711.JAA10696@adit.ap.net>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
To: Jay Qiu <qiuji AT cig DOT mot DOT com>, djgpp AT delorie DOT com
From: Nate Eldredge <eldredge AT ap DOT net>
Subject: Re: GNU binutils 2.8.1: ar.exe
Cc: qiuji AT cig DOT mot DOT com
Precedence: bulk

At 02:22  11/21/1997 -0600, Jay Qiu wrote:
>Hi, there,
>
>I recently got a copy of 'ar.exe' from djgpp web page.  Unfortunately,
>after I installed the "ar.exe" to my path (h:\bin) and run the 'ar'
>command as "R:\cp>ar -rc cp.a main.o", it always give error message as
>
>  h:\bin\ar.exe: cp.a: No such file or directory (ENOENT)
That makes sense. The `r' option says that you want to add to an existing
library, replacing any modules that are already there. Since `cp.a' does not
exist yet, you can't add to it. What you probably want to do is this:
ar -qc cp.a main.o
The `q' means that it should append instead of replacing, and the `c' means
to create the library if necessary.
>
>And it is strange that if I do "ar -?", it will return me with
>
>  h:/bin/ar.exe: illegal option -- ?
>  Usage: h:/bin/ar.exe [-]{dmpqrtx}[abcilosuvV] [member-name] 
>	archive-file file...
>  h:/bin/ar.exe -M [<mri-script]
>  h:/bin/ar.exe: supported targets: coff-go32 coff-go32-exe a.out-i386
>	srec symbolsrec tekhex binary ihex
>
>notice that the Usage is "h:/bin/ar.exe", rather than just "ar" (?).
First, `-?' is not usually the way to get help for GNU utils. Usually it
will be either `--help' or `-h'.
And the `h:/bin/ar.exe' stems from the Unix tradition of putting the
program's name in the help. Since it doesn't know what the user might have
renamed it to, it uses the contents of `argv[0]'. On Unix, this is just its
name (`ar'), but on DOS it includes the full path and filename for (I think)
compatibility with DOS. You can ignore the path, etc.
>I compiled the C/C++ code from the command line (NT's DOS window) with
>the Borland C++ compiler (v5.0) to generate the object files, and then
>used the 'ar' utility to create a library archive file from those object
>files.
That's another problem. Borland's compiler uses a different and incompatible
object file format. DJGPP's `ar' is only intended to work with COFF object
files produced by GCC. You'll have to use one of Borland's tools to make
libraries of Borland code.

Nate Eldredge
eldredge AT ap DOT net