CMake Problems Windows 8.1 – Part 3

The final build problem found with the awk script used to auto-generate the automatic enumerations header file and the codes reference text file.  The problem was that when building with Qt Creator (procedure will be provided in the next post), the build aborted with a strange error message after running this script.  It correctly built the output files, and telling it to build again allowed it to successfully complete the build.

The problem was in the part of the script that generates the codes.txt reference file that lists all the codes by code index and by code name.  This information is helpful to aid debugging, but otherwise it is not used.  To sort by code names, it pipes the code name output through the sort command.  It was desired that names like Asc_Code and Asc2_Code be sorted like this, but it was reversing these because the underscore sorts after the 2 character.

An attempt to correct this issue was made be adding the "-d" option (dictionary order) to the sort command which tells it to only recognize letters and digits ignoring underscore characters.  When building under Windows, it was calling the Windows sort command.  This sort command did not recognize this option and reported an error, which caused the build to fail.

Unfortunately, adding this option did not work as desired anyway.  The problem was that with the underscores removed, the above names become AscCode and Asc2Code and the 2 character still sorted before the C character.  This was not noticed when this option was added.  Anyway, once this option was removed, the build no longer failed on Windows.  (Curiously, the Windows sort command does sort the names as desired.)