Only Spaces May Separate Additional Libraries in PWB

 Last reviewed: July 17, 1997
Article ID: Q70058
1.00 1.10 | 1.00 1.10 
MS-DOS    | OS/2
kbtool kberrmsg

The information in this article applies to:

  • Microsoft Programmer's Workbench for MS-DOS, versions 1.0 and 1.1
  • Microsoft Programmer's Workbench for OS/2, versions 1.0 and 1.1

SUMMARY

There are several dialog boxes in the Programmer's WorkBench (PWB) that include a field titled "Additional Libraries" where you may specify the names of external libraries to be used in a project. When specifying the names of more than one library in any of these fields, the library names should be separated only by spaces, not commas or semicolons. Using any separator other than a space will result in LINK errors or the generation of an incorrect LINK command line.

MORE INFORMATION

When compiling and linking a program within PWB, the following error may be produced if commas are used to separate libraries in any of the Additional Libraries fields: 

   Link: fatal error L1092: cannot open module-definition file
When you use commas to separate library names, PWB does not remove the commas. Instead, PWB places the entire Additional Libraries string in the makefile as the LLIB_G, LLIB_D, or LLIB_R macro (depending on whether you enter the library in the global, debug, or release Additional Libraries field). Then, PWB generates commands in the makefile to create a response file where all sequences of spaces in the macro are replaced with a single space, a plus sign, and a newline.

When LINK is invoked with the resulting response file, it assumes that the first comma between libraries is the normal LINK command-line separator that delimits the library field from the next field, the module-definition (.DEF) file field. Thus, LINK tries to read the following plus sign as if it is the name of a .DEF file, and therefore, fails with the L1092 error.

If semicolons are used to separate the library names, the makefile is again generated as described above, so the semicolons are written to the response file. As soon as LINK reads the first semicolon, it assumes the default response for remaining LINK input and does not read the remaining response file data. This causes particular problems with LINK options specified in PWB because the PWB generated makefile places all LINK options on the last line of the response file. Thus, all LINK options are ignored if a semicolon is encountered first in the libraries field.

A different, more obscure problem occurs when the libraries in the Additional Libraries field are specified with complete names with the .LIB extension and they are separated only with commas and no intervening spaces. In this case, LINK fails with the following error: 

   LibraryName.lib(1) : syntax error
Also, if the incremental linker (ILINK.EXE) is used with these scenarios, the following ILINK error may be generated: 

   ILINK : warning L4266 : invalid .EXE file
Note that none of these errors is due to problems in LINK or PWB. To achieve the intended results, only spaces should be used to separate libraries in the Additional Libraries field.

Additional reference words: kbinf 1.00 1.10 PWBIss
KBCategory: kbtool kberrmsg
KBSubcategory: PWBIss
Keywords : kb16bitonly

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Last reviewed: July 17, 1997
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