How do I add an icon to a mingw-gcc compiled executable?

Question

In Windows, using mingw's gcc, is there anyway to specify that the output exe file is to take an icon file, so that the exe file shows with that icon in explorer?

Answer 1

use windres to compile your resources, and add them to your executable.

Answer 2

First you need to create a .rc file that looks something like this:

id ICON "path/to/my.ico"

Well, actually, I suppose you need to create the icon first... but anyway... the ID can pretty much anything. It doesn't matter unless you want to refer to it in your code.

Then run windres as follows:

windres my.rc -O coff -o my.res

Then you just include my.res along with your object files when you link. e.g.,

g++ -o my_app obj1.o obj2.o my.res

And that should be all there is to it. Hope it helps, I spent an entire evening tracking his down last week when porting my wxwidgets program from linux to windoze...

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And, at no extra charge, if you want to include version information in your application, add the following boilerplate to your .rc file and modify appropriately:

1 VERSIONINFO
FILEVERSION     1,0,0,0
PRODUCTVERSION  1,0,0,0
BEGIN
  BLOCK "StringFileInfo"
  BEGIN
    BLOCK "080904E4"
    BEGIN
      VALUE "CompanyName", "My Company Name"
      VALUE "FileDescription", "My excellent application"
      VALUE "FileVersion", "1.0"
      VALUE "InternalName", "my_app"
      VALUE "LegalCopyright", "My Name"
      VALUE "OriginalFilename", "my_app.exe"
      VALUE "ProductName", "My App"
      VALUE "ProductVersion", "1.0"
    END
  END

  BLOCK "VarFileInfo"
  BEGIN
    VALUE "Translation", 0x809, 1252
  END
END

Note, the langID is for U.K. English (which is the closest localisation to Australia I could identify.) If you want U.S. "English" then change the BLOCK line to:

BLOCK "040904E4"

and the translation line to:

VALUE "Translation", 0x409, 1252

See here for for info.

Answer 3

Evan, thanks for a great reply. I've reposted this on my blog here.