What's up with VS "Cannot find or open PDB file"?How to solve

Sometimes, when we use VS (Visual Studio) to compile the program, there will be a prompt of "Cannot find or open the PDB file", and at this time, the program will fail to generate and cannot be run, as shown in the following figure:

#include#includeusing namespace std;int main(){vectorv1; // create an empty vector;vectorv2(5); //Create a vector with 5 elements;vectorv3(7, 3); //Create a vector with 7 elements and a value of 3vectorv4(v3); // copy constructorvectorv5(v3.begin(), v3.begin() + 3); //Copy the elements in the v3 range to v5// way 1cout << "1. The number of elements in v1:" << v1.size() << endl;cout << "2. v2 output: ";for (unsigned int i = 0; i < v2.size(); i++){cout << v2[i] << " ";}cout << endl;}

Don't panic, this kind of prompt is not a code error, but a problem with the compiler settings. Just change the settings and it will be OK.

Let's talk about what a PDB file is

When the program is compiled on VS, all dynamic link libraries (dll files) that the program depends on will also be compiled. During the compilation process, each dll will generate a pdb file, also known as a "symbol file", which is aAn information file that stores data, which contains some debugging information of the dll library during the compilation process, such as global variables, local variables, function names and their entry addresses used in the program.

The pdb file is mainly used to debug programs. It is mostly used when there are multiple projects in VS, and the projects are interdependent. Using the pdb file to debug the program often results in twice the result with half the effort. Beginners generally do not use it.arrive.

When using VS to debug a program, all pdb files generated by your program and the dll library that the program depends on will be loaded by default, but the result is often that VS cannot find the pdb file of the dependent library by itself, so it promptsYou "cannot find or open pdb file".

How to fix this error

We can make appropriate settings for VS to enable it to find the corresponding PDB file. The specific steps are as follows (here we take VS2017 as an example, and the operation steps of other versions of VS are the same).

1) Select "Debug --> Options" in the menu bar, as shown below:

2) After the "Options" dialog box pops up, select "Debugging --> General", and check "Enable source server support" in the option column on the right (the 3 sub-options included do not need to be checked), at this time, theA security alert box will pop up, select "Yes", as shown below:

3) Still in the "Options" dialog box, select "Debugging --> Symbols", and check "Microsoft Symbol Server" in the option bar on the right, a prompt dialog box will pop up, click "OK"That's it.At the same time, for the directory of cache symbols, select the directory in the illustration:

4) After confirmation, re-run your program. When running for the first time, it may wait for a few seconds because the compiler will load all the pdb files of the dynamic link library.After the program runs, the prompt "cannot find or open the pdb file" in the previous output window disappeared, as shown in the following figure:

As shown in the figure above, because the pdb file, also known as the "symbol file", the "symbol loaded", that is, the pdb file corresponding to the dynamic link library is successfully loaded.