How do I fix MSB3073 error in my post-build event

Question

I m working on a project that requires that DLLs generated by building my solution to be copied from the bin folder to another folder  both of which are on my machine  in my C drive  I ve written a batch file that uses xcopy to accomplish this  which you can see here   xcopy  s  y  q  C  Users scogan Documents Visual Studio 2012 Projects Organizr Server bin Debug Organizr Services dll   C  inetpub wwwroot AppServer bin   xcopy  s  y  q  C  Users scogan Documents Visual Studio 2012 Projects Organizr Server bin Debug Organizr Services pdb   C  inetpub wwwroot AppServer bin     Now  I ve tried numerous iterations of this file  which is located at   C  Users scogan Desktop CopyFiles bat   so my post-build event command line looks like this   call C  Users scogan Desktop CopyFiles bat   I ve run this batch file on its own with two text files in folders on my desktop  and it works fine  I ve also run it as it is with the files I need to copy on its own  and that works fine  too  However  when I try to run this as a post-build event  I get this output   1 gt   Organizr - gt  C  Users scogan Documents Visual Studio 2012 Projects Organizr Client bin Debug Organizr exe 1 gt   File not found - Organizr Services dll 1 gt   0 File s  copied 1 gt   0 File s  copied 1 gt   File not found - Organizr Services pdb 1 gt c  Windows Microsoft NET Framework v4 0 30319 Microsoft Common targets 4291 5   error MSB3073  The command  call C  Users scogan Desktop CopyFiles bat  exited with code 4    I ve done some research  and found that error code 4 means that  Initialization error occurred  There is not enough memory or disk space  or you entered an invalid drive name or invalid syntax on the command line    I ve also looked up what MSB3073 is  and haven t really found much that can help me there  So  my question is what am I doing wrong  Are the absolute paths messing it up  Any help here is appreciated

User · Answer

The specified error is related to the post built event  Somehow VS tool is not able to copy the files to the destination folder  There can be many reasons for it  To check the exact error cause go to Tools   Option  Project and Solution   Built and run  and change  MsBuild project build output verbosity  to  Diagnostic   It will give you enough information to detect the actual problem

User · Answer

This is too late but posting my experience for people looking at it later -  In MS VS 2010 I had the same issue  It got resolved by putting quotes to post build copy command args which contained spaces   In Project Properties -- gt  Configuration Properties -- gt  Build Events -- gt  Post-Build Event -- gt  Command Line change   copy   ProjectDir a b c   OutputPath   to  copy    ProjectDir a b c     OutputPath

User · Answer

Following thing you should do before to run copy command if you facing some issue with copy command    open solution as a administrator and build the solution  if you have problem like  0 File s  copied  check you source and destination path  might you are using wrong path  it would be better if you run the same command in  command prompt  to check whether it is working fine or not

User · Answer

I solved it by doing the following   In Visual studio I went in Project - gt  Project Dependencies  I selected the XXX Test solution and told it that it also depends on the XXX solution to make the post-build events in the XXX Test solution not generate this error  exit with code 4

User · Answer

For what it s worth  the problem in my case was caused by using     as the directory separator in a copy command  Must use backslashes

User · Answer

Playing around with different project properties  I found that the project build order was the problem  The project that generated the files I wanted to copy was built second  but the project that was running the batch file as a post-build event was built first  so I simply attached the build event to the second project instead  and it works just fine  Thanks for your help  everyone  though

User · Answer

I ve found the issue happens when you have multiple projects building in parallel and one or more of the projects are attempting to copy the same files  creating race conditions that will result in occasional errors  So how to solve it    There s a lot of options  as above just changing things around could solve the issue for some people  More robust solutions would be      Restrict the files being copied i e  instead of xcopy   TargetDir         instead do xcopy    TargetDir   TargetName          Catch the error and retry i e         loop     xcopy  Y  R  S  J  Q     TargetDir   TargetName      somewhere      if ErrorLevel 1 goto loop    Use robocopy instead of xcopy You probably won t want to do this as it will increase your build times  but you could reduce the maximum number of parallel project builds to 1

User · Answer

I had the same problem for my Test project  I found out why my post build event wasn t working and that s because I was copying files before running the   ProjectName  exe command and some of these files were required for Test project itself  Hence  by just moving   ProjectName  exe as the first command fix the issue

User · Answer

In my case  the dll I was creating by building the project was still in use in the background  I killed the application and then xcopy worked fine as expected

User · Answer

The Post-Build Event  under Build Events  in the properties dialog  of an imported project  had an environment variable which was not defined   Navigated to Control Panel All Control Panel Items System Advanced system settings to add the appropriate environment variable  and doing no more than restarting VS2017 resolved the error  Also  following on from  Seans and other answers regarding multiple project races contentions  create a temp folder in the output folder like so      and select the project producing the preferred output     and build  no rebuild clean  is a speedy solution

User · Answer

If the problem still persists even after putting the after build in the correct project try using  copy  instead of xcopy  This worked for me

User · Answer

I was getting this error after downloading some source code from Github  Specifically the rust oxide development framework  My problem is that the Steam ps1 script file  that s used to update some of the dlls from Steam was blocked by the OS  I had to open the files properties an UNBLOCK it  I had not realized this was done to ps1 files as well as exes

User · Answer

Prefer the MsBuild  Copy  task in an AfterBuild target over a post-build event   Append this Target into your project file and remove the PostBuildEvent      lt Target Name  AfterBuild  gt       lt Copy SourceFiles  C  Users scogan Documents Visual Studio 2012 Projects Organizr Server bin Debug Organizr Services               DestinationFolder  C  inetpub wwwroot AppServer bin              OverwriteReadOnlyFiles  true             SkipUnchangedFiles  false    gt   lt  Target gt

User · Answer

I faced this issue recently and surprisingly only i was having this problem and none of my team members were facing this issue when building the project code   On debugging i found that my code directory had spacing issue   It was D  GIT Workspace abc xyz   As a quick fix i changed it to D  GITWS abc xyz and it solved the problem

[visual-studio-2012] How do I fix MSB3073 error in my post-build event?

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