Invoking cl.exe (MSVC compiler) in Cygwin shell

Question

I\'m heavily using Cygwin (with PuTTY shell). But, it\'s quite tricky to invoke cl.exe (that is, the Visual C++ compiler toolchain) in the Cygwin Bash shell. R

Answer 1

One utility I found pretty invaluable for compiling stuff with msvc from a cygwin environment is a wrapper I found in the Coin 3D library's source repository called "wrapmsvc", who's binary can be found here.

The program wraps cl.exe and converts any GCC args specified to the appropriate cl.exe arg. It also uses cygwin API to correctly translate the filepath from cygwin form (/cygdrive/c/temp/test.c) to it's actual file path (C:\temp\test.c).

The source took me a little while to find last time, but it's called "wrapmsvc.cpp", so if you need to compile it, look for that file. If you do happen to compile it and you get some depreciation warnings/errors about the use of cygwin_conv_to_posix_path or cygwin_conv_to_win32_path, make the following changes:

Change the line:

(void)cygwin_conv_to_posix_path(s.c_str(), buf);

to

(void)cygwin_conv_path(CCP_WIN_A_TO_POSIX, (const void *)s.c_str(), (void *)buf, (size_t)MAX_PATH);

and change:

(void)cygwin_conv_to_win32_path(s.c_str(), buf);

to

(void)cygwin_conv_path(CCP_POSIX_TO_WIN_A, (const void *)s.c_str(), (void *)buf, (size_t)MAX_PATH);