Getting the DLL name from a mingw32-compiled lib/a file

Question

Hi,

I am changing our build system in order to handle cross-compiling and packaging.

It is a common thing to ship dependencies' DLLs but CMake's FindXXX modules(./configure checks) don't provide the path to these DLLs but only to .a files. I quickly looked inside the .a libs and they all seem to contain the DLL's name.

What would be a proper way of extracting them[PS: The DLL file name of each .a] from the .a file on a Linux build machine?

Answer 1

The .a file is the version of the library for static linking - if there is a dynamic linking version, it will be in the same location with the same name, except with a .so extension. (.so means "shared object").