Copy target file to another location in a post build step in CMake
Use generator expressions in the POST_BUILD
command instead of manually computing the output path. These are configuration aware. Example:
add_custom_command(TARGET mylibrary POST_BUILD
COMMAND "${CMAKE_COMMAND}" -E copy
"$<TARGET_FILE:mylibrary>"
"my_target_path/$<CONFIGURATION>/$<TARGET_FILE_NAME:mylibrary>"
COMMENT "Copying to output directory")
Rather than using the obsolete LOCATION
property, prefer using generator expressions:
add_custom_command(TARGET mylibrary POST_BUILD
COMMAND ${CMAKE_COMMAND} -E copy $<TARGET_FILE:mylibrary> ${targetfile}
)
You could also just generate the exe in the target directory directly by setting the target property RUNTIME_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY
instead of copying it. This has per-configuration options (e.g. RUNTIME_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY_DEBUG
).
set_target_properties(mylibrary PROPERTIES
RUNTIME_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY_DEBUG <debug path>
RUNTIME_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY_RELEASE <release path>
)
For further details run:
cmake --help-property "RUNTIME_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY"
cmake --help-property "RUNTIME_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY_<CONFIG>"
Also, you should be able to use forward slashes throughout for path separators, even on Windows.
The other answers weren't 100% clear to me...
Say you're building an executable test_base.exe
, the following will build the executable then copy the .exe to the base 'build' directory:
add_executable(test_base "")
target_sources(test_base
PRIVATE
catch_main.cpp
catch_tests.cpp
sc_main.cpp
)
target_link_libraries(test_base PRIVATE Catch2 systemc)
add_custom_command(TARGET test_base POST_BUILD
COMMAND ${CMAKE_COMMAND} -E copy $<TARGET_FILE:test_base> ${PROJECT_BINARY_DIR}/test_base.exe
COMMENT "Created ${PROJECT_BINARY_DIR}/test_base.exe"
)
So, after this runs your project will have:
<project dir>/build/test_base.exe