visual studio - Building MSVC project with cmake and command-line

Question

Good day!

Let us have a source file main.cpp and a CMakeLists.txt file containing the next text:

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.6)
project(tmp)

set(CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS "-Wall")
add_executable(tmp.elf main.cpp)

Let's say the main.cpp file contains a simple "Hello, World!" program:

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
  printf("Hello, World!
");
  return 0;
}

We can build the project with cmake CMakeLists.txt && make. Then we'll just get the tmp.elf file which we can just run. Or we can get no tmp.elf file and assume that something is wrong with the main.cpp source file (assuming the compiler and cmake are installed properly on the building system).

So, the question is: how can we do the same on the Windows machine? E.g. we will get the tmp.vcproj file after running cmake CMakeLists.txt and then we need to build it somehow. How the build process can be performed using command-line? (Java's Process.start(), actually :-P )

Answer 1

You can start the build in a platform and CMake generator independent fashion by invoking cmake with the --build option:

cmake --build .

For multi-configuration generators, you can specify the configuration in the following way:

cmake --build . --config Release

Also see the documentation.