Platform independent resource management [duplicate]

Question

I'm looking for a way to embed text files in my binaries (like windows resource system). I need something thats also platform independent (works in windows and linux). I found Qt resource management to be what I need but I'm not keen on my app depending on Qt for this alone. I also found this tool at http://www.taniwha.com/~paul/res/ .. but it is too platform specific.

Answer 1

The xxd utility can be used to create a C source file, containing your binary blobs as an array (with the -i command line option). You can compile that to an object which is linked into your executable.

xxd should be portable to most platforms.

Answer 2

If you're using QT 4.5, you can make sure that program is only dependent on one small piece of QT, such as libqtcore. QResource is a part of libqtcore.