If you’ve just upgraded to OS X 10.9 “Mavericks”, but chose to stay with good ol’ Xcode 4.6.3, it may stall at “Creating universal binary” when building projects.
If it happened to you, check if lipo command works on your system. If it does not, get lipo from Xcode 5 distro, like so:
sudo cp /Volumes/Xcode/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin/lipo /usr/bin
Kudos to Daniel Åkerud, @steipete, @holtmann for the solution!
Lifesaving, I was just looking for a hammer to smash my Mac with after hours of running in circles when compiling stuff between xcrun and lipo…Thanks!
Thank you so much!
Hi there!
You are right on the spot with what I’ve done: updating to xcode 5 and trying to still work with xcode 4.
but getting the Creating universal binary hanging.
I wasn’t able to fix it as you described because I didn’t understand how to get the lipo from xcode 5.
I tried the line you’ve suggested but I got this (after asking me for a password)
cp: /Volumes/Xcode/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin/lipo: No such file or directory
Would really appreciate your help.
Ophir
I did not see your message until now, sorry.
Did you mount the .dmg with Xcode 5? The Terminal command copies “lipo” from the mounted dmg with Xcode 5.
If you already have Xcode 5 installed somewhere, just replace the “/Volumes/Xcode/” part in the command with the path to your Xcode.app with Xcode 5.
Alternatively, if you feel uncomfortable using Terminal, you can perform the manipulation yourself. Find Xcode.app of your Xcode 5, right-click on it, press “Show Packages Contents…” and navigate to
Find “lipo” there, copy it, then in Finder’s menu choose Go > Go to Folder… (or Cmd+Shift+G), type /usr/bin and paste “lipo” there. Finder will prompt you for your password.
Thank you! I was trying to build Growl 2.1.3 from source, and this one definitely one of the problems keeping it from working!