Use of the "devices" command

The devices command allows you to specify which Symbian OS device to develop for, and configures the required environment settings according. The command was introduced with Symbian v7.0 SDKs (but can be used to manage older ones like the Series 60 v1 SDK which is based on OS v6.1).

The devices command has the following functions:
  list all installed/configured SDKs
  configure a SDK so that it can be recognized by the command (necessary for pre-7.0 SDKs).
  specify the SDK to use
  specify an alias for a SDK
  ...

The use of this command is normally not required if you are using Metrowerks Codewarrior and compile from the IDE. But its use is mandatory for user of Visual Studio or command line build.

List all installed SDKs

Just typing devices at a DOS prompt will bring you the list of installed and properly configured SDKs.

Here is the result of the command for my system:

Each SDK is identified by a string of the form <kit name>:<device name>

This string is called device-identifier or DeviceID in the documentation. You can also give each SDK a shorter name or alias.

From the above, you can deduct that I have the following SDKs installed:
  UIQ v2.1 SDK
  Nokia Series 60 v1.2, v2.0, v2.1 and v2.6 (Series 60 2nd Edition with Feature Pack 2) (those are for Codewarrior)
  Nokia Series 60 v2.1 (Series 60 2nd Edition with Feature Pack 1) (for Microsoft/Borland)
  Nokia Series 80 and Nokia Series 90 SDKs (for Codewarrior)

Notice the "- default" tag behind the UIQ v2.1 line: this means that the UIQ SDK will be used unless you specify otherwise.

Note: The result of this command will probably differ on your system as a reconfigured all the SDKs manually to have coherent naming across all those Nokia SDKs... which is not the case by default!

Switching between SDKs

To switch SDKs, use the following command:

devices -setdefault @<sdk-identifier>

Where the sdk-identifier is the device-identifier string or the alias corresponding to the SDK to use.

Example:

The both command above are equivalent (but the alias version is much nicer to use!) and the result can be confirmed by entering devices again:

Switching SDKs using the devices -setdefault command globally affects your system: the new SDK becomes immediatly active in all your DOS shells which may not be twhat you want to achieve if you need to work with several SDK simultaneously.

Fortunately enough, you can override the default setting for the current shell by defining a EPOCDEVICE environment variable :

You can even use a per command override of the two above by adding @<sdk-identifier> at the end of any Symbian command. To launch the Series 60 v2.1 emulator regardless of the default or session settings:

Defining an alias for a SDK

Using the alias name rather than the full device-identifier is a lot simpler but aliases are not created automatically for you. It is not a big task however and you just need to do this once after the SDK installation:

devices -setalias <alias> @<device-identifier>

Example:

Adding a SDK

Only v7.0 and later kits automatically update the device list when they are installed. If you also want to use the devices command to manage earlier kits, you can add them to the list yourself using the command devices -add, specifying the location of the kit's epoc32\ (the directory that contains the release\ sub-directory) and epoc32\tools\ directories.

For example, the following commands add a v6.0 SDK which has its epoc32 tree at C:\symbian\6.0\nokiacpp\, and its epoc32\tools tree at C:\symbian\6.0\shared\ and create a s80v10 alias for it:

Getting information on a SDK

Use devices -info to retrieve a few information on a specific SDK (useful to check that you did not make a mistake when manually configuring your SDK):

Getting help on the devices command

Enter devices -help to get a short summary usage: