[Xcode] Error from Debugger: Program not being run

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Level 6

17,036 points

[Xcode] Error from Debugger: Program not being run

All of a sudden my Cocoa-AppleScript projects are not being run with *Build and Run* in Xcode 3.2.2. Well, most of them anyway - some old, and some downloaded projects are OK, but projects that ran OK yesterday give me an error today:

Running…
No executable file specified.
Use the "file" or "exec-file" command.
No executable file specified.
Use the "file" or "exec-file" command.
The program being debugged is not being run.
The program being debugged is not being run.

No project settings were changed (I don't even use the debugger, just the console), and the only thing that I've done in the mean time is a software update. The only thing new from that was a Java update, which I don't think should have had anything to do with it. I was having the same problem even building new blank projects, but I've since updated to 3.2.4 and reset the Xcode preferences, which at least got the blank projects going again.

I've compared some of the settings between projects that work and projects that don't, but I have no idea what to look for. The built applications will run when double-clicked by themselves, just not in Xcode.

Update: zipping the project files and then unzipping them seems to fix the issue, but I would like to know what to look for that could have caused this problem.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.4), (and various older stuff keeping dust off the shelves)

Posted on Oct 30, 2010 1:54 AM

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Answer 1

Tech Guru

Level 2

205 points

Oct 30, 2010 9:30 AM in response to red_menace

did you try just doing a "clean all" before compiling?

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Answer 2

red_menace Author

Level 6

17,036 points

Oct 30, 2010 9:56 AM in response to Tech Guru

I tried "clean all" and emptying the cache (I had previously cleaned before zipping up copies of the project files). I didn't make any changes to the projects, and they ran recently. It almost looks like a project setting since new projects were doing the same thing, but I definitely didn't change any of those.

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Answer 3

red_menace Author

Level 6

17,036 points

Oct 30, 2010 11:30 AM in response to red_menace

AHA! Well, although I could have sworn I ran some of these projects from their current location, the problem wound up being related to characters in the name of one of the containing folders.

I sometimes use leading spaces in the folder names to get them to sort to the top of the list, but even doing that you sometimes need to use additional characters to get the items to sort in the desired way. One of the characters I used (a tilde) seems to get expanded by one of the underlying utilities - my archived projects were in this folder, while other downloaded examples (and copies I had made to other locations) worked since they were outside of the problem folder. It was weird that pretty much everything else ran correctly, though.

Lesson learned - do NOT use characters that may be special to a shell script in any of your project file paths.

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