Post Build exited with code 1

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I have a project with a post build event:

copy $(ProjectDir)DbVerse\Lunaverse.DbVerse.*.exe  $(TargetDir)

It works fine every time on my machine. I have a new developer who always gets the "exited with code 1" error. I had her run the same command in a DOS prompt, and it worked fine. What could be causing this? Is there any way to get to the real error?

We are both using Visual Studio 2008.

Hospitium answered 21/11, 2008 at 20:41 Comment(1)

in my case, the answer Tim Scott provide near the end of this page (so I overlook in the beginning) solve my problem. – Mercola 29/11, 2016 at 6:18

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121

She had a space in one of the folder names in her path, and no quotes around it.

Hospitium answered 21/11, 2008 at 21:52 Comment(2)

putting quotes on path names is a good practice. not working in paths that contains space is event better :-) – Sternum 21/11, 2008 at 21:54

copy /y "$(TargetDir)Dotfuscated\" "$(TargetDir)" this command notworking for me and if i am write exit 0 at end then work fine. can u tell me why? – Addiel 22/10, 2012 at 3:12

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The one with the "Pings" helped me... but may be explained a little better...

For me the solution was to change:

copy $(TargetDir)$(TargetName).* $(SolutionDir)bin

to this (adding quotes):

copy "$(TargetDir)$(TargetName).*" "$(SolutionDir)bin"

Hope it works for you. :-)

Paez answered 18/2, 2010 at 19:51 Comment(0)

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I have added this for future visitors since this is quite an active question.

ROBOCOPY exits with "success codes" which are under 8. See: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/954404

This means that:

robocopy exit code 0 = no files copied
robocopy exit code 1 = files copied
When the result is 1, this becomes an error exit code in visual studio.

So i solved this easily by adding this to the bottom of the batch file

exit 0

Suggest that handle ROBOCOPY errors in this fashion

rem each robocopy statement and then underneath have the error check.
if %ERRORLEVEL% GEQ 8 goto failed

rem end of batch file
GOTO success

:failed
rem do not pause as it will pause msbuild.
exit 1

:success
exit 0

Confusion will set in when no files are copied = no error in VS. Then when there are changes, files do get copied, VS errors but everything the developer wanted was done.

Additional Tip: Do not use a pause in the script as this would become an indefinite pause in the VS build. while developing the script, use something like timeout 10. You will notice this and comment it out rather than have a hanging build.

Curiosa answered 4/5, 2012 at 1:52 Comment(3)

Bumping an 8-year old answer to say that, if you want a one-liner, and not a bat file, you can add an "& exit 0" at the end of the post-build event string. – Reverent 26/6, 2020 at 19:45

Adding "exit 0" at the bottom, worked fine. And IMHO this seems to be a fine solution since we can see the log for actual issue if anything actually occurs. – Connate 2/9, 2020 at 15:46

Using the Copy msbuild task in the project too is an option. Only problem is we will have to edit the project file manually and project designer does not support adding/editing this. – Tamarin 25/4, 2021 at 15:29

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My reason for the Code 1 was that the target folder was read only. Hope this helps someone! I had a post build event to do a copy from one directory to another and the destination was read only. So I just went and unchecked the read-only attribute on the directory and all its subdirectories! Just make sure that its a directory that's safe to do so!

Talley answered 27/12, 2010 at 22:1 Comment(2)

Saved me an hour, thanks! Downloaded some code from internet and Windows 7 sets the folder to read-only automatically. – Conscientious 31/3, 2011 at 13:45

I also used xcopy instead and with the /y flag. All commands microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/… – Conscientious 31/3, 2011 at 14:18

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Get process monitor from SysInternals set it up to watch for the Lunaverse.DbVerse (on the Path field) look at the operation result. It should be obvious from there what went wrong

Sternum answered 21/11, 2008 at 20:50 Comment(0)

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I had to run VS as Administrator to get my post-build copy to an OS protected "..\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies" to work

Poncho answered 30/4, 2012 at 21:31 Comment(0)

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I had a similar issue but specifically in a Jenkins build environment. To fix the issue, I switched from using a copy command in the post build event to using a copy target.

I changed this:

   <PropertyGroup>
      <PostBuildEvent>copy $(ProjectDir)bin\BLAH.Common.xml $(ProjectDir)App_Data\BLAH.Common.xml</PostBuildEvent>
   </PropertyGroup>

to this:

  <Target Name="AfterBuild">
    <Copy SourceFiles="$(ProjectDir)bin\BLAH.Common.xml" DestinationFolder="$(ProjectDir)App_Data\" />
  </Target>

and it works fine now.

The specific error I was getting was:

(PostBuildEvent target) -> 
  C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Common.targets(4291,5): error MSB3073: The command "copy <http://1.2.3.4/job/BLAHv2/ws/Api/bin/BLAH.Common.xml> <http://1.2.3.4/job/BLAHv2/ws/Api/App_Data/BLAH.Common.xml"> exited with code 1. [<http://1.2.3.4/job/BLAHv2/ws/Api/Api.csproj]>

Calycle answered 31/10, 2016 at 15:4 Comment(4)

How did you make that change? Did you manually edit that? How do you execute the target? That looks like something you'd have to specify in the msbuild command line. I have the exact same issue in my jenkins environment which is weird because all of the msbuild created folders are always read-only. Why it copies fine on my machine but not in the server is beyond me. – Sides 6/3, 2018 at 20:30

I just used Notepad++ to edit the csproj file. The "AfterBuild" hook is a standard hook, so if it exists, it is called automatically after the build process. – Calycle 7/3, 2018 at 11:59

Thanks. I wasn't sure if you had a custom msbuild file with a target or if it was just the visual studio created file. FYI: In my case I figured out that the problem had to do with build order. I forgot to set the build dependencies in the release, solution configuration so the projects were building on the server in a different order such that the input file was not yet available when the copy was executed. Making sure that the .dll was produced before the other project that needed it fixed it for me. That was a very subtle issue with the solution configuration that caused it. – Sides 7/3, 2018 at 22:12

It wasn't obvious to be at first that build order is for each configuration. I thought that was more of a solution setting but evidently you have to update the build order in ALL configurations. – Sides 7/3, 2018 at 22:13

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For those, who use 'copy' command in Build Events (Pre-build event command line or/and Post-build event command line) from Project -> Properties: you 'copy' command parameters should look like here: copy "source of files" "destination for files". Remember to use quotation marks (to avoid problems with spaces in strings of address).

Grew answered 27/12, 2012 at 14:13 Comment(0)

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I was able to fix my Code 1 by running Visual Studio as Admin. Apparently it didn't have access to execute the shell commands without Admin.

Benempt answered 19/8, 2014 at 17:45 Comment(0)

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Ok, this is a problem with many solutions, so I just post mine to give people more hints. My situation is to double check the folders in your path and make sure all of them exist in your machine. For example: "$(SolutionDir)\partBin\Bin\$(ProjectName).pdb", but "Bin" is not in partBin folder.

Netherlands answered 28/8, 2014 at 13:59 Comment(1)

BTW, \ after $(SolutionDir) is redundant. – Cymogene 16/7, 2019 at 12:35

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As a matter of good practice I suggest you replace the post build event with a MS Build File Copy task.

Sternum answered 21/11, 2008 at 21:58 Comment(1)

what are the benefits of one over the other? – Haemophilia 15/3, 2013 at 14:32

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For me I had to make sure the the program I was coping file to was not running at the time. There weren't any errors in the syntax. Hope this helps someone.

Schaffhausen answered 18/7, 2011 at 14:18 Comment(0)

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I just received the same error. I had a % in the destination path that needed to be escaped

c:\projects\%NotAnEnvironmentVariable%

needed to be

c:\projects\%%NotAnEnvironmentVariable%%

Smallminded answered 1/12, 2012 at 18:26 Comment(0)

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For those, who use 'copy' command in Build Events (Pre-build event command line or/and Post-build event command line) from Project -> Properties: target folder should exist

Mauriac answered 21/3, 2016 at 14:51 Comment(0)

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So many solutions...

In my case, I had to save the bat file with non-unicode (Western, Windows) encoding. By default when I added the file to visual studio (and probably I should have done it outside of the VS), it added with UTF-8 encoding.

Stevenson answered 14/2, 2014 at 2:24 Comment(0)

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I had this same issue and it turned out that it was because I had renamed the project. I went into the project properties and changed the Assembly Name and Root Namespace to the project name and it worked great after that!

Keystroke answered 6/7, 2015 at 15:43 Comment(0)

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Yet another answer ...

In my case I had a Visual Studio 2017 project targeting both .Net Standard 1.3 and .Net Framework 2.0. This was specified in the .csproj file like this:

<TargetFrameworks>netstandard1.3;net20</TargetFrameworks>

I also had a post-build event command line like this:

copy "E:\Yacks\YacksCore\YacksCore\bin\net20\Merlinia.YacksCore.dll" "E:\Merlinia\Trunk-Debug\Shared Bin\"

In other words I was trying to copy the .Net Framework .dll produced by the build to an alternative location.

This was failing with this error when I did a Rebuild:

MSB3073 The command "copy "E:\Yacks\YacksCore\YacksCore\bin\net20\Merlinia.YacksCore.dll" "E:\Merlinia\Trunk-Debug\Shared Bin\"" exited with code 1.

After much frustration I finally determined that what was happening was that Rebuild deleted all of the output files, then did the build for .Net Standard 1.3, then tried to run the post-build event command line, which failed because the file to be copied wasn't built yet.

So the solution was to change the order of building, i.e., build for .Net Framework 2.0 first, then for .Net Standard 1.3.

<TargetFrameworks>net20;netstandard1.3</TargetFrameworks>

This now works, with the minor glitch that the post-build event command line is being run twice, so the file is copied twice.

Victoria answered 19/6, 2018 at 4:11 Comment(0)

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In my case I had to cd (change directory) before calling the bat file, because inside the bat file was a copy operation that specified relative paths.

:: Copy file
cd "$(ProjectDir)files\build_scripts\"
call "copy.bat"

Culmination answered 7/8, 2019 at 6:7 Comment(0)

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For me, the reason was that the build created a platform folder on the build output folder (x86), and the fix was to change the solution platform from 'Mixed Platforms' to 'Any CPU' in VS

Cletis answered 8/3, 2021 at 15:48 Comment(0)

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This is the year of 2023, I use VS2022, and been lucky to bump into Error MSB3073 The command "copy /Y "C:/vcpkg/installed/x64-windows/bin/cairo-2.dll" C:\Users\User\source<projectName>\x64\Debug:VCEnd" exited with code 1. The PostBuild event field had a content of copy /Y "C:/vcpkg/installed/x64-windows/bin/cairo-2.dll" $(TargetDir), and the culprit was not a space in the folder names but the directory separator character '/' I used in the copy source file parameter. As soon as I changed the PostBuild event field content to copy /Y "C:\vcpkg\installed\x64-windows\bin\cairo-2.dll" $(TargetDir), the error MSB3073 was gone and the project has built successfully. The penetration of forward slashes into path names used in Windows API functions relaxes developer's alertness, but shell path handling functions still use only a backslash director separator

(PathFindNextComponent Parses a path and returns the portion of that path that follows the first backslash

)!

Wirth answered 14/2, 2023 at 7:7 Comment(0)

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