Coverity and "Failed to initialize ICU, try using the --prevent-root option"

Question

I have the bin directory in the build directory of my project.

When I run the command ./bin/cov-build --dir cov-int make I get the following error -

[ERROR] Failed to initialize ICU, try using the --prevent-root option.

Answer 1

Coverity uses ICU to handle multibyte encodings. This requires the ICU data files, present in the Coverity installation. That error suggests those files are either missing or not present in the expected location, and suggests you try using --prevent-root to tell it where it can expect to find the files.

Did you only copy the bin directory to your project? This would likely explain the issue, and using --prevent-root to point to the actual Coverity installation should resolve it.