Headless Eclipse Build returns ERRORLEVEL 13

Question

Everything was going well. Nightly builds ran for more than a month with no problems. However, suddenly when invoking the feature builder from Eclipse the execution ends right away with the message.

ERRORLEVEL 13

As far as I know I haven't changed anything, as this computer is normally not touched. (It is only used for the nightly builds).

I've googled around to see what this error means but to no avail. I found a link from IBM that shows a custom bat file that catches this error, but the explanation given is not very useful.

My guess is that this is related to the workspace, somehow, or that the whole eclipse installation is corrupted.

Do you have any idea what this error means and how can it be corrected?

Answer 1

It should mean "ant build failed", meaning the headless ant script fails at some point.

You should check if you can catch the log/output generated by this script to analyze this ant session and see at what point the ant script fails.

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If it fails right away, it usually is because of:

• a change in rights (writing access), or
• in environment variable modifications, or
• in resource access (path non accessible).

You also have to check if the computer is still in its original windows domain, and if the rights (admin ?) associated with the account running the ant script are still the same.

Answer 2

After reading what the error code means thanks to the answer from VonC I understood where to look. The problem was a lot more obscure that it seems.

I looked into the configuration folder for Eclipse (logs are either written there or in the .metadata folder when something goes wrong), and I found a huge log file. Inside the file I found the following error:

application org.eclipse.sdk not found

and the following exception, followed by a plugin name, several times:

java.util.zip.ZipException: Too many open files

Several plugins could not be loaded, causing a cascade of missing dependencies that prevented Eclipse from launching. I searched the web for this exception and found the following bug description from SUN, which says that Java 1.5.0 can not open more than 2,100 zip files.

The problem started a while after I installed the BABEL project translations for Eclipse into the build computer. These are more than 900 fragments, containing translations for many plugins, one for each language. As I installed it on top of an existing eclipse installation, it seemed that it was not a problem to open them.... until I cleared the workspace for the builds. Then Eclipse wouldn't launch anymore. I went over the limit. It didn't help that the first thing I tried to fix the build was, again.... clearing everything.

Because I only use this computer for headless builds, I didn't realize that the problem was in Eclipse itself and I was looking inside the build process. I only realized when I looked into the log file.

After installing Java 1.6.0_11 I was able to launch Eclipse and go on with my build.