Question

After loading an existing MFC application in Visual Studio 2008, I am left with one linking error:

LINK : fatal error LNK1104: cannot open file '..\..\xpressmp\lib\xprm_rt.lib' 

I have looked "everywhere", but I can’t figure out where the relative path is set. The lib file is located in C:\xpressmp\lib, and I have added this directory both under Tools-Options->Projects and Solutions->VC++Directories->Library files and Project->Properties->Linker->Additional Library Directories. I also searched all files in the project to no avail.

I have the library file (xprm_rt.lib) listed under Additional Dependencies for both Debug and Release. I also tried adding the path there, but that did not help. I cannot find any #pragma comment-directives.

About the LNK1104, the file clearly does not exist in the location that the linker is searching. But I can’t see why it is searching there (..\..\…) as I have not specified any relative paths.

Any help appreciated 🙂

UPDATE: In the project .vcproj file, I found the following xml:

<File RelativePath="..\..\XpressMP\lib\xprm_rt.lib"></File> <File RelativePath="..\..\XpressMP\lib\xprs.lib"></File> 

After deleting these lines (where were they set?), I was able to link successfully. Thanks for your help, it seems the relative library path was indeed being appended "automatically" by VS.

Answer 1

It sounds like one of a couple possibilities to me:

• The library itself is setting the lib path via a #pragma comment(lib, ...) directive; search library headers to see if that’s the case
• You have a project for the library included in your solution which your main project is dependent on, and the relative library path is being appended automatically by VC; check the command line property page for the main project to see if that’s the case

That’s what I can think of which could cause the error; hope it helps.