Tools for inspecting .lib files?

Question

I'm evaluating some underdocumented software. When I build a sample project, I'm getting a linker error that looks like:

error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol

There aren't a whole lot of lib files with this app, so I can solve this problem with trial and error, but I know there's a more elegant way is to solve this problem. In the java world, I would grep FOO *.jar to find the jar and I'm looking for the C++ analog. I'm working with C++ code in Visual Studio 2005. I suspect the lib.exe utility with the /LIST option can get the information, but I've been unsuccessful so far. It just prints this:

Microsoft (R) Library Manager Version 8.00.50727.762
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

granite50.dll
granite50.dll
granite50.dll
granite50.dll
...

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

More than one thing can be your problem here. I'm not sure looking in the lib file will be the best way to solve it, IMHO... However, the DUMPBIN.exe is probably the tool you're looking for. Use it from the command line, but make sure your paths are set, or use the "Visual Studio Command Prompt" that VS installs for you in your VS start menu.

Answer 2

First of all you need to know which type of library you are looking at. Some libraries simply contain linkages for a DLL (i.e., import libraries) and others are code objects that become part of the executable image (i.e., static libraries). From the looks of that output, you were looking at a DLL import library.

Next you want to use the right tool. Lib.exe is used to extract object files from libraries and what-not. This is pretty much the same as the jar utility for Java. Microsoft provides dumpbin.exe which will dump information from the library. I see that LarryF already mentioned this.

For import libraries, run dumpbin.exe -headers foo.lib and redirect it to an output file. The output will contain snippets for each symbol that the related DLL exports. Search for lines starting with " Symbol name :". Note that there are two spaces before and after "Symbol name" if you want an exact match. You can also run the output through findstr to generate a list of symbols and redirect that to a text file if you want something a little nicer to look at:

dumpbin.exe -headers foo.lib | findstr /c:"  Symbol name  :" > foo-exports.txt

The other option is to open the related DLL with depends.exe.