Using robocopy with Visual Studio 2010 Post-build and Pre-build events
Robocopy outputs 1 upon success, unlike most programs that exit with 0 on success. Visual Studio (and MSBUILD) interprets exit code of 1 as an error.
How can Robocopy be used in Visual Studio post- and pre-build events such that its failure and success are correctly identified by the build environment?
Note: this is more or less a repost of this post.
Answer
Adding this answer per request. Based on Asaf's solution, and adding skrebbel's comment.
You can simplify the check to:
robocopy <opt> <src> <tgt>
if %errorlevel% leq 1 exit 0 else exit %errorlevel%
As kindly remarked in the comments, you may want to adjust the '1': It depends on what your operation should treat as an error. Have a look at the meaning of the bits that in combination make up the number returned by robocopy:
0×10 Serious error. Robocopy did not copy any files. This is either a usage error or an error due to insufficient access privileges on the source or destination directories.
0×08 Some files or directories could not be copied (copy errors occurred and the retry limit was exceeded). Check these errors further.
0×04 Some Mismatched files or directories were detected. Examine the output log. Housekeeping is probably necessary.
0×02 Some Extra files or directories were detected. Examine the output log. Some housekeeping may be needed.
0×01 One or more files were copied successfully (that is, new files have arrived).
0×00 No errors occurred, and no copying was done. The source and destination directory trees are completely synchronized.