Question

I am trying to compile code, the makefile created using qmake.
When I run mingw32-make I get the following error:

cd bzip2-1.0.5\ && c:\QtSDK\Desktop\Qt\4.7.3\mingw\bin\qmake.exe c:\Documents an
d Settings\user\My Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\meshlab\meshlab\meshla
b\src\external\bzip2-1.0.5\bzip2-1.0.5.pro -o Makefile
Cannot find file: c:\Documents.
Cannot find file: and.
Cannot find file: Settings\user\My.
Cannot find file: Documents\Visual.
Cannot find file: Studio.
Cannot find file: 2010\Projects\meshlab\meshlab\meshlab\src\external\bzip2-1.0.5
\bzip2-1.0.5.pro.
mingw32-make: *** [bzip2-1.0.5\Makefile] Error 2

By the error it appears that mingw32-make doesn’t understand paths that have spaces in them. Is that true? Is there a way around it?

Answer 1

From the MinGW “Getting Started” guide:

MinGW may have problems with paths containing spaces, and if not, usually other programs used with MinGW will experience problems with such paths. Thus, we strongly recommend that you do not install MinGW in any location with spaces in the path name reference; i.e. you should avoid installing into any subdirectory of “Program Files” or “My Documents”, or the like.

I suspect the same problems found in running executable files will also manifest itself with other files as well. You could try wrapping the whole thing (file specification) inside double quotes and this may work but Windows is sometimes not as logical as UNIX-based shells in this area.

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Spaces in file names are evil anyway 🙂