Thursday, April 15, 2010

Fixing “Invalid search path” for LIB environment variable in MSBuild

Problem: Trying to run msbuild.exe against a .sln file results in a failed build with an error message containing the error 

error CS1668 : Warning as error : Invalid search path 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\lib'
 specified in 'LIB environment variable' -- 'The system cannot find the path specified. '

Examining the path C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A shows no \lib folder present.

Solution: Simply add an empty \lib folder. MSBuild doesn’t actually need anything in the SDKs folder for most builds; however, the vsvars32.bat file sets that directory as the LIB environment variable anyway.

This hacky fix has worked for me on a number of different systems and I’ve yet to run across any real issues. I’m blogging it here so I’ll remember next time without having to spend too much time searching…

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4 comments:

  1. Joe8/04/2010 10:44 AM

    Thanks for leaving this online Jim...I was trying to build this morning from the cmd line and just ran into this. :)

    -Joe

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous3/02/2011 3:46 AM

    Made my day, thx!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous3/24/2011 5:32 PM

    you're the best! thanks a lot for this hack.
    -iyab

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous6/11/2019 7:34 PM

    thanks for posting this fix! this warning started showing up the other day and was really bugging me.

    ReplyDelete