Just discovered a minor bug in the ndk-build.cmd script provided with Android NDK r8.

If you’re calling ndk-build.cmd from Visual Studio, or any other IDE or script, beware that if your build fails, the script will still return an exit code of 0, as if no problem happened. This happens due to en error in the last line of the script:

%NDK_ROOT%\prebuilt\windows\bin\make.exe -f %NDK_ROOT%build/core/build-local.mk SHELL=cmd %* || exit /b %ERRORLEVEL%

The %ERRORLEVEL% from running make.exe is not yet available when exit /b is executed, so the script returns 0 despite the error returned by make.

The fix is very simple: just remove the || exit /b %ERRORLEVEL% from the last line. As the return value of the .cmd script is the return value of the last command, the error returned by make will be propagated by the script and your IDE will successfully detect it.

You can get a fixed version of the script here: http://visualgdb.com/KB/ndk-build.zip.