CLI

• Multiple options can be specified at a time, e.g. /vnl409 gets resolved as if it were /v /n /l409.
• The /sl option (‘Specify the resource string length limit in percentage’) must be between 1 and 100 (if specified). If it’s set to 100, the maximum length of a string literal becomes 8192.
  • The rc tool will crash if /sl 100 is set and there is a string literal with exactly 8193 characters in it. If one more character is added to the string literal, it errors with ‘string literal too long’.
  • The default maximum string literal length (if /sl is not specified) is 4097. If /sl 50 is specified, the maximum string literal length becomes 4096 rather than 4097. So, there’s no /sl setting that’s equivalent to the default string literal length limit.
  • If /sl 33 is set, the maximum string literal length becomes 2703 (8192 * 0.33 = 2,703.36). 2704 chars will error with string literal too long.
  • If /sl 15 is set, the maximum string literal length becomes 1228 (8192 * 0.15 = 1,228.8). 1229 chars will error with string literal too long.

Undocumented options

• /a seems to be a recognized option but it’s unclear what it does and is totally undocumented AFAICT
• Either one of /?c or /hc will add a normally hidden ‘Comments extracting switches:’ section to the help menu, with /t and /t-prefixed options dealing with .LCX and .LCE files. Can find no info about any of this online. A generated .LCE file seems to be an XML file with some info about the comments and resources in the .rc file(s).
• /p will output the preprocessed version of the .rc file to <filename>.rcpp instead of outputting a .res file (i.e. it will only run the preprocessor).
  • There doesn’t appear to be any way to control the name of the .rcpp file (/fo does not affect it)
• /s <unknown> will insert a bunch of resources with name HWB into the .res. I can’t find any info on this except a note on this page saying that HWB is a resource name that is reserved by Visual Studio. The option seems to need a value but the value doesn’t seem to have any affect on the .res contents and it seems to accept any value without complaint.
• /z seems to always error with fatal error RC1212: invalid option - /z argument missing substitute font name. Not sure what type of value it’s looking for, or what it would affect if it were provided a valid value.
  • A value with / in it seems to get past the argument missing substitute font name error and will allow rc.exe to compile successfully.