Does 'ar' work with native MS Windows libs?

[Coatimundi]

Williams, Gerald S (Jerry) wrote:
> Coatimundi wrote:
>> If paths are included in the archive (which is typical for
>> libs created by Visual Studio), then ar may in some cases
>> claim that members (displayed with 'ar t') do not exist
>> when doing "ar x lib.a {object}" either by path/name.obj
>> or just name.obj.
> 
> I think you need to use the -P option:
> 
>  $ ar t foobar.lib
>  release\foo.obj
>  release\bar.obj
>  $ ar xv foobar.lib 'release\foo.obj'
>  no entry release\foo.obj in archive
>  $ ar xvP foobar.lib 'release\foo.obj'
>  x - release\foo.obj
> 
> gsw
> 

Thank you for bringing this up.  I forgot to mention (a sure sign that 
my multitasking scaling is rolling over) that I also tried the P option. 
  While this usually works, I found cases where it did not. 
Interestingly, these cases corresponded to libs compiled with debugging 
information, which are precisely the libs for which 'ar t' returns some 
(about 25%) but not all of the member names.  I know the expected 
members are there, because (1) 'ar x' (with no member specified) does in 
fact extract all of the members and (2) I can link against them.  Very 
strange to my simple mind.

I see nothing wrong with the source for 'ar' so I suspect that there is 
something not quite right about my lib (which was built with MS's 
LIB.EXE) with debugging info.  Since I see nothing wrong with the source 
and I am short on time, I am going to chalk this up to an unidentified 
mistake on my part, unless I see it again and have time to build 
bintools myself and step through the code in debug.

The good news is I have not seen any problem with non-debug-info libs, 
which is sufficient for my purposes.

Thanks for your good suggestion.  And thanks to the Cygwin team for 
porting an incredibly useful set of tools!


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