What does the red exclamation point icon in Eclipse mean?

Pops picture Pops · Apr 12, 2011 · Viewed 156.7k times · Source

What does the red exclamation point icon in Eclipse mean? There are lots of different search results on the Internet about "red exclamation point icons" and "red exclamation mark decorators" and "red bang icons," no doubt because lots of plugins and programming-related tools use red exclamation point icons. So, to be clear, this is the one I mean:

screenshot of red exclamation point icon

It appears as a decorator on projects in the Package Explorer view.

In my case, the icon went away when a missing build path variable was filled in. I'm using MyEclipse 9.0, but I don't think this is MyEclipse-specific. Other people on the Internet have reported that it has to do with other issues, including Subclipse, the .svn folder and moving files between working copies.

Answer

ZoogieZork picture ZoogieZork · Apr 12, 2011

According to the documentation:

Decorates Java projects and working sets that contain build path errors

In practice, I've found that a "build path error" may be caused by any number of reasons, depending on what plugins are active. Check the "Problems" view for more information.