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

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

If source file not found xcopy returns error code 4 also.

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

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.