[Mingw-users] windres unavoidably reports syntax error at *.rc:1

[ColdShine <col...@us...>]

Greetings, I am new to MinGW.

I installed the latest MinGW and MSYS packages (installer versions);
then I set up a .CMD file with proper environment for both bin
directories. To make sure it works, before trying to compile my
ultimate targets (PHP and Apache HTTPD), I tried to compile a couple
of fairly simple open-source programs (of which names I won't mention,
for the reason I'm about to explain - if you're curious, look at the
end of this message*, but they really don't matter).

The problem is, whenever make is launched, it always stops after
trying to run windres, due to an error message from the latter:

C:\Programs\MinGW\bin\windres.exe: filenamedoesntmatter.rc:1: syntax error

So I tried to manually edit the makefile and deleting references to
any resource file, and I found out the problem only involves windres:
gcc and ld work properly (I am even able to run configure scripts by
executing "sh configure", and no errors are reported).

Then I tried case one: I used gcc to get a preprocessed version of one
of the .rc files, and stripped any preprocessor-generated
#-instructions (thus leaving just a version information block, with no
constants whatsoever). windres failed, still complaining about the
first line (even when I edited the file once more so that the first
line was empty).

As case two, I tried to just launch "windres -i empty.rc -o
empty.res", where empty.rc is an existing empty file, and it was still
complaining about a syntax error in the first line.

For all of the files I tried with, I did using both Unix and DOS line
endings (using unix2dos and dos2unix), but it made no difference.


I don't know what to do. Everything seems fine, *except* windres,
which seems to complain no matter what.

Any help or direction is greatly appreciated.
Thank you.


* The programs are GNU patch and Notepad++ (ScintRes.rc).