android - How to diagnose "Error executing aapt" error in Eclipse?

Question

I'm ready to tear my hair out because I can't get Eclipse unstuck from a state where it thinks it can't find aapt:

Error executing aapt. Please check aapt is present at /usr/local/android-sdk-linux_x86/platform-tools/aapt

I've found a bunch of posts on this subject, which suggest deleting the error in the Eclipse UI, deleting R.java, rebuilding the project, restarting Eclipse, etc. These things help temporarily, but as soon as I edit an XML file, Eclipse gets borked again. It's getting really annoying to rebuild all my source and restart Eclipse every time I change an XML file.

aapt is clearly there:

$ ls -l /usr/local/android-sdk-linux_x86/platform-tools/aapt
-rwxr-xr-x 1 boris boris 3764858 2011-07-28 11:50 /usr/local/android-sdk-linux_x86/platform-tools/aapt

Is there a way to know exactly what the error is that's occurring? I tried looking in the Eclipse console output and in .metadata/.log in my project and didn't see anything related.

Answer 1

Hit this again today, and discovered that verbose output from aapt doesn't help. It just spits out the aapt command to the console and fails without an error.

I think I've finally gotten to the bottom of what's going wrong. I believe that aapt is failing due to insufficient memory. My Eclipse process was using 1.2GB of memory. When Eclipse runs aapt, it forks the process which, from what I understand, allocates another 1.2GB just for running aapt.

I looked at my process list, and saw that Firefox was using almost 400MB of memory. I killed Firefox, and then aapt started working. Crazy.