Visual Studio: LINK : fatal error LNK1181: cannot open input file

Question

I\'ve been encountering a strange bug in Visual Studio 2010 for some time now.

I have a solution consisting of a project which compiles to a static library, and anot

Answer 1

Maybe you have a hardware problem.

I had the same problem on my old system (AMD 1800 MHz CPU ,1GB RAM ,Windows 7 Ultimate) ,until I changed the 2x 512 MB RAM to 2x 1GB RAM. Haven't had any problems since. Also other (minor) problems disappeared. Guess those two 512 MB modules didn't like each other that much ,because 2x 512 MB + 1GB or 1x 512 MB + 2x 1GB didn't work properly either.

Answer 2

I had the same error when running lib.exe from cmd on Windows with a long argument list. apparently cmd.exe has max line length of about 8K characters, which resulted that the filenames at the end of this threshold got changed, thus resulting in bad filename error. my solution was to trim the line. I removed all paths from filenames and added single path using /LIBPATH option. for example:

/LIBPATH:absolute_path /OUT:outfilename filename1.obj filename2.obj ... filenameN.obj

Answer 3

I recently hit the same error. Some digging brought up this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/815645

Basically, if you have spaces in the path of the .lib, that's bad. Don't know if that's what's happening for you, but seems reasonably possible.

The fix is either 1) put the lib reference in "quotes", or 2) add the lib's path to your Library Directories (Configuration Properties >> VC++ Directories).

Answer 4

I don't know why, but changing the Linker->Input->Additional Dependencies reference from "dxguid.lib" to "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft DirectX SDK (June 2010)\Lib\x86\dxguid.lib" (in my case) was the only thing that worked.

Answer 5

I solved it with the following:

Go to View-> Property Pages -> Configuration Properties -> Linker -> Input

Under additional dependencies add the thelibrary.lib. Don't use any quotations.