You need to create the icon first. Then you need to create a RC file with the below content. Here we'll name it as my.rc.
id ICON "path/to/my.ico"
The id mentioned in the above command can be pretty much anything. It doesn't matter unless you want to refer to it in your code. Then run windres as follows:
windres my.rc -O coff -o my.res
Then while building the executable, along with other object files and resource files, include my.res which we got from the above step. e.g.:
g++ -o my_app obj1.o obj2.o res1.res my.res
And that should be all there is to it.
And, at no extra charge, if you want to include version information in your
application, add the following boilerplate to a new .rc file and follow the above mentioned steps.
1 VERSIONINFO
FILEVERSION 1,0,0,0
PRODUCTVERSION 1,0,0,0
BEGIN
BLOCK "StringFileInfo"
BEGIN
BLOCK "080904E4"
BEGIN
VALUE "CompanyName", "My Company Name"
VALUE "FileDescription", "My excellent application"
VALUE "FileVersion", "1.0"
VALUE "InternalName", "my_app"
VALUE "LegalCopyright", "My Name"
VALUE "OriginalFilename", "my_app.exe"
VALUE "ProductName", "My App"
VALUE "ProductVersion", "1.0"
END
END
BLOCK "VarFileInfo"
BEGIN
VALUE "Translation", 0x809, 1252
END
END
Note, the langID is for U.K. English (which is the closest localisation to
Australia I could identify.) If you want U.S. "English" then change the BLOCK
line to:
In the RC file, the nameID does not even have to be a name, it can just be
an integer. The filename must be quoted only if it contains a space. Instead
of:
Try Resource Hacker. I was able to cross compile my project in Linux (WSL) and generate an icon from the logo on the homepage. Just needed a simple way to embed it in the exe and this program worked great.
Resource Hacker by Angus Johnson