Question

When I am building my project it is showing the following error. This is the first time Im facing this error:

Argument list too long: recursive header expansion failed at /Applications/iWork ’09/Pages.app/Contents/Resources/Templates/Modern Business Cards.template/Contents/Resources.

How can I solve this?

Answer 1

This is an Xcode “problem”, as the error is generated from having a recursive search in your header search path. I’ve solved this in the past by unchecking the “Recursive” flag on items in the Header search path and instead link to each directory directly. There might be other (better) ways to solve this problem but it appears to be somewhat a bug with Xcode not reporting the error correctly when it is hit with a path it can not fully resolve.

There is also some info here about this error:

Xcode 3.1 problem checking dependencies | Cocoabuilder

There someone wrote,

Since GCC doesn’t natively support
recursive search paths, Xcode
simulates them by expanding such a
path into a discrete -I or -F or -L
flag for each directory under the
parent directory, but this can rapidly
expand to the point that it results in
a command line too long to be issued.

The difference between Xcode 3.0 and
3.1 here is that Xcode 3.0 would silently stop expanding the recursive
search path if it got too long and
simply use whatever it had computed up
to that point, which would result in
semi-deterministic (and extremely
difficult to diagnose) errors for
certain types of projects. So now
Xcode emits an error if it was unable
to fully expand the recursive search
path.

So you may need to remove that
recursive search path, or modify it to
expand to a smaller set of
directories, or convert it to a
smaller set of non-recursive search
paths. Or, alternately, reorganize
your source to have fewer directories
the path can expand to.

Incidentally, having a smaller set of
expansions could also lead to
somewhat-faster compilation times,
since it’s fewer directories that the
compiler has to search in when
compiling each file. (I don’t know
the magnitude of impact this would
have, though.)