Reputation: 2006

Eclipse Build Error "A class file was not written. The project may be inconsistent, if so try refreshing this project and building it"

I have been struggling with a very weird issue that has suddenly popped up on the latest version of Eclipse Classic (4.2.2).

Everytime I try creating or refactoring a class or subclass in any of my projects (all Java) in my Eclipse workspace I get an error at the very top of my class that says

A class file was not written. The project may be inconsistent, if so try refreshing this project and building it

Again, this happens when I create new classes. And even when I rename current classes, then undo the renaming, its totally fine, but changing a single character in the name causes this error to happen for that specific class.

I have Auto Build on, and I tried multiple times to clean and refresh every project as well as restart Eclipse entirely.

I have literally no idea how to even start figuring out how to fix this. The solutions i've found through search didn't help, so i'm hoping I might find any clues here.

Upvotes: 18

Answers (30)

Cristhian Javier Ulloa Carmona

Reputation: 111

I had the same problem in Lubuntu with Eclipse Snap, when you import a Maven project it stays in its place, I solved it by removing the project from Eclipse and copying it to the Eclipse-Workspace and from there I imported it again.

Upvotes: 1

umutbilalokur

Reputation: 21

It happened to me when I ran eclipse with;

./eclipse

after running it like;

sudo ./eclipse

So, I tried with sudo again and it worked, probably running it with administrator mode will solve the issue.

Upvotes: 0

guest

Reputation: 11

When some directories can not be written by Eclipse, eg because they are owned by root instead of normal user, Eclipse starts throwing these "project may be inconsistent" errors instead of giving a proper error message.

I consider this an Eclipse bug. If target is not writable, report that, instead of "project may be inconsistent"

Problem was solved by fixing all offending target directories and reverting the project.

Probably can be done with "mvn clean" if your case revolves around maven and the problem is the target directories.

In my case I guess I accidentally built the project with "mvn package" while being root instead of normal user.

Upvotes: 1

Andy Carson

Reputation: 1

In my case it was Carbonite trying to backup the class files using a poor internet connection... eclispe couldn't delete one or more class files because Carbonite had locked them.

Upvotes: 0

Sagar Talreja

Reputation: 29

I fixed it by:

1.Remove (delete the target folder) from the project/target

2.Switch to Eclipse, force maven update the project

no errors.

Upvotes: 1

Alice

Reputation: 21

I had the same issue, and the root cause was that some directories were owned by another user. I would not suggest to run eclipse by root user as you might later ran into other issues, instead just make the current user own everything inside the folder (and the folder itself):

sudo chown $USER:USERGROUP -R ~/path

sudo chown alice:sudo -R JavaProjects/

Upvotes: 0

Anand Rockzz

Reputation: 6658

In my case current user didn't have access to this project dir

Upvotes: 0

r-uu

Reputation: 635

@Denny's answer put me on the right track, though in my case it was the target directory. I deleted it for some reason and something automatically recreated with owner root. Changing the directory owner was not enough as it contained files that were also owned by root. So make sure to really remove the complete content of the directory and to change the owner.

Upvotes: 0

nag

Reputation: 23

I had this issue. I did the following, it resolved.

Open Eclipse in Administrator mode; Right click on eclipse.exe "Run as administrator" Clean all projects.

Upvotes: 0

bzani

Reputation: 527

I've been throught that error once when I used wsdl2java to extract java classes from a wsdl, it turns out that all classes were created in the same "class", causing end classes with long names (error - File name too long). When I organized and rename some classes the error disappeared.

Upvotes: 0

Prem

Reputation: 11

I had the same issue and it got fixed by running eclipse in administrator mode Eclipse Shortcut-->Right click-->More-->Run as Administrator

Upvotes: 0

Alexander Gorbenko

Reputation: 510

Try to launch Eclipse as Administrator.

Upvotes: 1

Bret Hogg

Reputation: 121

I solved this problem by running Eclipse as root.

Upvotes: 3

Hanuman G

Reputation: 11

I had same issue, it is something similar but this post didn't help in my case. I have many inner classes which is causing the compiler to create class names with all inner class names together that is creating class name more than 255 character file limit on NTFS! read it in some other blog. I thought it will be helpful to post here.

Ex : classA$InnerClassB$......InncerClassZ.class in target folder it won't generate the class if it exceeds this limit. Try renaming your inner class name shortened. In my case i have to add InnerclassZ as its exceeding its not generating class and Eclipse complaining.

A class file was not written. The project may be inconsistent, if so try refreshing....

I shortened InnerClassZ to IClassZ fixed the issue.

Upvotes: 0

Richie_b

Reputation: 159

I had the same issues, the following worked for me:

Right click eclipse then running "as an Administrator"
Click Project > Clean.

Upvotes: 13

Baburao A

Reputation: 21

Before giving a try to the above solutions. Just cleaned the project and it worked.

Upvotes: -2

AJSuarez

Reputation: 1

For linux (Debia) and working on Spring boot project (maven):

$ sudo mvn clean

Then open Eclipse and File -> Refresh.

Upvotes: 0

Sơn Việt

Reputation: 31

I was try run

Project->Clean...

And Rebuild. My problem was resolved

Upvotes: 0

Denny

Reputation: 177

I come up with the same error, and in my case, this is because the permission of the project/bin directory is not recursively 775

I fixed it by:

Remove the project/bin directory: sudo rm -rf project/bin
Switch to Eclipse, rebuild the project: Project->Clean...

Then no errors.

Upvotes: 1

Kapil Suri

Reputation: 31

I had the same issue on Mac OS X. I had a maven project.

Try running the following command on Terminal. This looks like an access issue.

sudo mvn clean

Provide password for admin user.

Then open Eclipse and refresh your project.

Upvotes: 3

Jovo Skorupan

Reputation: 267

Just changed and saved java file to recompile the class. Then error disappeared.

Upvotes: 0

Carlos Mario

Reputation: 159

I solved it changed the owner of the project files. I changed from root(old owner) to user my current(user that i use with eclipse).

Upvotes: 0

Jocke

Reputation: 5

Had the same issue. but cleaning the project and restart eclipse didn't help and disk space was not the issue. Solved the issue by copy the code to notepad(just to not lose it) and then delete the class, recreate it and paste the code back in again.

Upvotes: 0

user8574877

Reputation: 131

In my case, this was caused by the fact that the build output directories were owned by a different user, and Eclipse could not write into them.

Upvotes: 13

sri

Reputation: 11

In my case this kind of error caused due to disk space got full and it got resolved by just freeing disk space where eclipse have been installed. That is c/d/e drivers.

Upvotes: 1

Manu

Reputation: 819

It may not be the best response but to fix it, I've just delete the error marker.

Upvotes: 0

Raman Tretyak

Reputation: 1

In my case such error was caused by a question mark in a quoted method name (I use geb+spock combination for automated testing).
So this method name will throw an error "Do you want something?"()
And this will not "Do you want something"()

Upvotes: 0

Ganesh Satpute

Reputation: 3941

I had the same problem and here's how I solved it in the end: It turned out that the disc space on the drive where workspace resides was full.

Silly mistake but worth checking.

Upvotes: 13

user18428

Reputation: 1201

Clean your workspace by starting eclipse from the command line with the -clean argument :

eclipse -clean

Upvotes: 6

user166566

Reputation:

We are using Eclipse here too and have to handle a workspace with more than 200 plug-ins. Every now and then people have similar problems with their workspace and inconsistencies reported in a weird way by Eclipse. What people here usually do is (next step only in case previous step didn't help): - trying to ContextMenu->Team->Clean/Refresh the whole workspace - creating a new workspace and check out all necessary files from the repository - reinstalling Eclipse to a new directory

From my experience after using the Eclipse IDE on a daily basis for many years, it doesn't make very much sense to waste too much time with these issues, unless they aren't solved by one of the steps above. It takes too much time to struggle with these things, while starting from scratch is done in an hour or less (and usually fixes the issue). If your Eclipse still behaves strangely it might make sense to go through your installed plug-ins. Not all external plug-ins follow the Eclipse guidelines and can seriously harm the performance and operational consistency of your Eclipse installation (E.g. Sonar Plug-in, Toad Plug-in, ...)

Upvotes: 1

Eclipse Build Error &quot;A class file was not written. The project may be inconsistent, if so try refreshing this project and building it&quot;

Answers (30)

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Eclipse Build Error "A class file was not written. The project may be inconsistent, if so try refreshing this project and building it"