LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _WinMain@16 referenced in function ___tmainCRTStartup

When trying to compile a command line (non-GUI) program with Visual Studio I got the error:

LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _WinMain@16 referenced in function ___tmainCRTStartup

I’ve had this before and so have lots of others – it’s a continual question out there on the web – this is to provide at least one answer hopefully.

I went to:

Project  Properties -> Linker -> System -> SubSystem

and set it to

Console (/SUBSYSTEM:CONSOLE)

rather than

Windows (/SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS)

That suggested to the linker that maybe the program entry point should be “main” rather than “WinMain”

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