Cannot find Dumpbin.exe

Question

I do not see dumpbin.exe on my system. I have Visual Studio 2005 on my system. When I type dumpbin on the command line, it says unrecognizable command.

Does it come

Answer 1

In Visual Studio Professional 2017 Version 15.9.13:

• First, either:

  • launch the "Visual Studio Installer" from the start menu, select your Visual Studio product, and click "Modify",

  or

  • from within Visual Studio go to "Tools" -> "Get Tools and Features..."

• Then, wait for it while it is "getting things ready..." and being "almost there..."

• Switch to the "Individual components" tab

• Scroll down to the "Compilers, build tools, and runtimes" section

• Check "VC++ 2017 version 15.9 v14.16 latest v141 tools"

like this:

After doing this, you will be blessed with not just one, but a whopping four instances of DUMPBIN:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Professional\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.16.27023\bin\Hostx64\x64\dumpbin.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Professional\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.16.27023\bin\Hostx64\x86\dumpbin.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Professional\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.16.27023\bin\Hostx86\x64\dumpbin.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Professional\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.16.27023\bin\Hostx86\x86\dumpbin.exe

Answer 2

By default, it's not in your PATH. You need to use the "Visual Studio 2005 Command Prompt". Alternatively, you can run the vsvars32 batch file, which will set up your environment correctly.

Conveniently, the path to this is stored in the VS80COMNTOOLS environment variable.

Answer 3

You probably need to open a command prompt with the PATH set up properly. Look for an icon in the start menu that says something like "Visual C++ 2005 Command Prompt". You should be able to run dumpbin (and all the other command line tools) from there.