mingw and SDL command line - c++

Question

Now I see that this is not a unique problem and has been raised plenty of times before, but I have followed the advice given in other stack overflow questions and nothing seems to help.
My problem is pretty straight forward, I can not compile my project (a basic c++ gui) and include SDL, because I get: Undefined reference to WinMain#16
I started using code::blocks but it didn't work so moved to trying to compile the simplest implementation on the command line in windows 7, 64 bit, in an attempt to understand whats going on in the background.
The command I am running:
g++ test.cpp -L C:\Projects\C++\tester\SDL\lib -lmingw32 -LSDLmain -LSDL -mwindows
I had a weird issue with the -l parameter in that I had added in a path to the SDL includes folder, C:\Projects\C++\tester\SDL\includes but if I do it chucks a error saying it cannot find this directory, obviously I checked and rechecked the path to make sure it was correct, but leaving it out removes the error. Most likely the cause of my problem now I thing about it.
The answer in this question is pretty comprehensive and helps understand the problem further
but seems to suggest that the issue is that there is no main function defined, that seems to make sense, but doesn't SDL redefine main to SDL_main in SDL_main.h?
#define main SDL_main
I'd like to point out I am a c++ noob.
#include <string.h>
#include "SDL\include\SDL.h"
#include <iostream>
int main(int argc, char*argv[])
{
return 0;
}

Answer 1

Ok I spotted your error.
As you probably know, -L specifies link path while -l specifies the library to be linked. Your command says:
-L C:\Projects\C++\tester\SDL\lib -lmingw32 -LSDLmain -LSDL -mwindows
^^ ^^
Which mistakenly uses -L instead of -l. You meant to write:
-L C:\Projects\C++\tester\SDL\lib -lmingw32 -lSDLmain -lSDL -mwindows
Edit: regarding libSDL2.
First of all, you need to include <SDL2/SDL.h>. You also need to link against -lSDL2main and -lSDL2.
But the main problem here is that you are linking against -lmingw32, which expects a 32-bit architecture, while you are building and linking against the 64-bit version of libSDL2. If you build and link against the 32-bit version of libSDL2, all would be ok.
If your MinGW installation is 32-bits, then you are stuck with 32-bit builds and you need to use 32-bit libraries. If it is 64-bits, -lmingw32 needs to be replaced. Perhaps with -lmingw64, but I don't have a 64-bit MinGW installed to test it and I don't know if -lmingw64 actually exists or not.