Does the Visual Studio C compiler have an equivalent to GCC's -M?

Question

I would like to automatically generate a Makefile dependency list, but I am using Visual Studio 2005. If I were using GCC, I could pass -M (or one of the many variants) to create this dependency list.

Looking through the command line options to cl.exe, I don't see anything obvious. I can handle tweaking the output with post-processing, but the closer the better.

Answer 1

In the cl.exe of Visual Studio 2005 at least, there is the option /showIncludes.

Answer 2

I had to deal with that exact problem. We wanted to add a script that replaces the -M option. Here's how I did it:

1. find a source preprocessor ( and the include paths & defines you need )
2. run it on the file you need, and it should produce a preprocessed version.
3. most preprocessors have a switch that enables extra info ( such as the file where some code snippet came from )
4. write a simple script to extract all the header names
5. create a set out of them, so that you filter out duplicates.

It's how I've done it, and it worked. Good luck!

Answer 3

The compiler stores dependencies in the intermediate .idb file. You might be able to parse it from there.

See https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/kfz8ad09.aspx

You can find all included files prefixed with "/mr/inversedeps/" or "/ipm/header/" in there, it seems.

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I think you should also find dependencies in other intermediate files, e.g. "CL.read.1.tlog".