What is going wrong when Visual Studio tells me xcopy exited with code 4

Question

I m not very familiar with post-build events  so I m a little confused as to what s going wrong with my program  When compiling in visual studio 2010  I get the following   The command  xcopy C  Users Me Path Foo bar Library dsoframer ocx C  Users Me Path Foo bar bin Debug   Y  E  D xcopy C  Users Me Path Foo bar ApplicationFiles C  Users Me Path Foo bar bin Debug   Y  E  D xcopy C  Users Me Path url  C  Users Me Path Foo bar bin Debug   Y  E  D rmdir  S  Q C  Users Me Path Foo bar bin Debug  gwt-tmp  exited with code 4        The program appears to run fine  despite this error  but I don t want to just ignore this issue and hope nothing bad happens  Strangely  this line started out as only a single command  the first xcopy  but as I continued to compile the project  fixing other problems  mostly references  the error message expanded larger and larger  Any idea what could be going on   Edit  Here are the postbuild events that seem to be failing --  xcopy   ProjectDir Library dsoframer ocx   TargetDir   Y  E  D xcopy   ProjectDir ApplicationFiles   TargetDir   Y  E  D xcopy   SolutionDir com myUrl gwt www   TargetDir   Y  E  D rmdir  S  Q   TargetDir  gwt-tmp

User · Answer

I received the  exited with code 4  error when the xcopy command tried to overwrite a readonly file  I managed to solve this problem by adding  R to the xcopy command  The  R indicates read only files should be overwritten  old command   XCOPY  E  Y    ProjectDir source file   destination    new command  XCOPY  E  Y  R    ProjectDir source file   destination

User · Answer

I got this along with the message     Invalid drive specification   when copying to a network share without specifying the drive name  e g   xcopy     localhost   where  xcopy     localhost share   was expected

User · Answer

I had a post build command that worked just fine before I did an update on VS 2017  It turned out that the SDK tools updated and were under a new path so it couldn t find the tool I was using to sign my assemblies   This changed from this      call   VS140COMNTOOLS vsvars32       C  Program Files  x86  Microsoft SDKs Windows v10 0A bin NETFX 4 6 Tools x64 sn exe  -Ra    TargetPath      ProjectDir Key snk    To This      C  Program Files  x86  Microsoft SDKs Windows v10 0A bin NETFX 4 6 1 Tools x64 sn exe  -Ra    TargetPath      ProjectDir Key snk    Very subtle but breaking change  so check your paths after an update if you see this error

User · Answer

If any other solution is in the debug mode then first stop them all and after that restart the visual studio  It worked for me

User · Answer

In my case the issue was due to incorrect build order  One project had an xcopy command on post-build events to copy files from bin folder to another folder  But because of incorrect dependencies new files were getting created in bin folder while xcopy is in progress   In VS right click on the project where you have post-build events  Go to Build Dependencies   Project Dependencies and make sure its correct  Verify the project build order next tab to dependencies  as well

User · Answer

As other answers explain  exit code 4 may have many causes   I noticed a case  where resulting path names exceeded the maximum allowed length  just like here    I have replaced xcopy by robocopy for the affected post build event  robocopy seems to handle paths slightly different and was able to complete the copy task that xcopy was unable to handle

User · Answer

I ran across this issue  so I ran the xcopy command from the command line and it said   File creation error - The requested operation cannot be performed on a file with  a user-mapped section open    It was actually Visual Studio holding onto something   I just restarted Visual Studio and it worked

User · Answer

Xcopy exit code 4 means  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    It looks like Visual Studio is supplying invalid arguments to xcopy  Check your post-build event command via Project  gt  Right Click  gt  Properties  gt  Build Events  gt  Post Build Event   Note that if the   ProjectDir  or similar macro terms have spaces in the resulting paths when expanded  then they will need to be wrapped in double quotes  For example   xcopy    ProjectDir Library dsoframer ocx     TargetDir    Y  E  D1

User · Answer

If source file not found xcopy returns error code 4 also

User · Answer

Another thing to watch out for is double backslashes  since xcopy does not tolerate them in the input path parameter  but it does tolerate them in the output path

User · Answer

This can also come if the target folder is used by some other processes  Close all the programs which may use the target folder and try  You may use resource monitor windows tool  to check the processes which uses your target folder  This worked for me

User · Answer

I had the same problem  You could also check which way the slash is pointing  For me it worked to use backslash  instead of forward slash  Example  xcopy  s  y  C  SFML bin   dll     OutDir     Instead of   xcopy  s  y  C  SFML bin   dll     OutDir

User · Answer

It means      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    So basically it could be just about anything haha   try running the command one at a time from the command prompt to figure out which part of which command is giving you trouble

User · Answer

Switch the watch tab to the  ouput  and look for the xcopy command  Sometimes here you find some more message   the actual xcopy output   that could help you to solve the issue  If you don t see the output tab  use View-Output menu to show it

User · Answer

I addition to the accepted answer  the error can also occur when the destination folder is read-only  Common when using TFS

User · Answer

This error is due to if there is white spaces where your repo is copied   E g  my project is copied in below location c   projects My rest project then you can see the white spaces there  if you change your repo path to below  it should work c   projects myrestproject

[c#] What is going wrong when Visual Studio tells me "xcopy exited with code 4"

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