Solution to "launch: program 'c: \build\Debug\outDebug' does not exist" when debugging code in VS code

When developing code in vs code, we may encounter the problem of "launch: program 'c: \build\Debug\outDebug' does not exist" during running or debugging, as shown in the figure.

 Here we follow the prompts to open "launch.json"

{
  "version": "0.2.0",
  "configurations": [
    {
      "name": "C/C++ Runner: Debug Session",
      "type": "cppdbg",
      "request": "launch",
      "args": [],
      "stopAtEntry": false,
      "externalConsole": true,
      "cwd": "c:/Users/13967/Desktop/c/output",
      "program": "c:/Users/13967/Desktop/c/output/build/Debug/outDebug/",
      "MIMode": "gdb",
      "miDebuggerPath": "gdb",
      "setupCommands": [
        {
          "description": "Enable pretty-printing for gdb",
          "text": "-enable-pretty-printing",
          "ignoreFailures": true
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

After observation, I found that the problem should appear in the program

"program": "c:/Users/13967/Desktop/c/output/build/Debug/outDebug/",

The specific location of the code is located here, but this location is not accurate enough.

As shown in the picture, the compilation results of the C language code I wrote are stored in "C:\Users\13967\Desktop\c\output".

instead of "c:/Users/13967/Desktop/c/output/build/Debug/outDebug/" in "launch.json"

Therefore, we first need to change the file location to the folder where the C language compilation results are stored on our computer, and then add a line of "${fileBasenameNoExtension}.exe" at the end to locate the specific .exe application.

Taking my computer as an example, I finally changed it to this:

"program": "c:/Users/13967/Desktop/c/output/${fileBasenameNoExtension}.exe",

Problem solved successfully! As shown in the figure, the code can already set breakpoints and debug.

 

References:

Maxwell Ape’s CSDN Blog

Microsoft's Q&A community