Cannot build android project using Android Studio - Gradle 1.7

I'm copying here my final update as an answer.

It finally seems like i solved this issue cleaning up my resources, removing some unused XML and an unused theme. This obviously does not answer this question that i guess is of common interest.

Navigating the web i found that AAPT is know to fail with SegFault11, and often it does not give any information about the real error which can be caused by:

• Malformed Resources (Missing attributes, wrong tags, etc...)
• +id in Styles
• Duplicated resources / libraries
• Declare-Styleable missing name
• Resource missmatch, try to use different AAPT versions.
• unknown, like mine So it would be useful to: 1. Find a way to identify the real cause of this error 2. Wait for an update to AAPT that returns some error message 3. Write a list of possible common causes.

As Dale Cooper suggested, you could also try to run Lint and see if it finds any warning about resources.

I'm trying to find links to users experiencing those other causes (It's been some time since the original question), i will update this answer when i'll find them back.

I just had sort of the same problem, but on the processDebugResources step. After a couple of hours I started to try running diffrent verisons of aapt (/build-tools/[version]/aapt) and it turns out that they give one hell of different error messages. The one I was originally using was 19.0.1 which only gave me Segmentation fault but when i tried out 18.1.1 I was suddenly pointed to a line in a menu.xml which had a resource missmatch. The problem turns out to be that I hade removed the default @string/action_settings because I thought I didn't use it.

Conclusion, trying different versions of aapt may help you find a resource missmatch.

Yeah, I was just struggling with similiar issue. It turned out that I've got some non-finished code in menu.xml file:

   <item android:id="@+id/action_search"
    android:title="@string/action_search"
    android:icon="@drawable/"
    app:showAsAction="ifRoom|collapseActionView"
    />

exactly this line was missing drawable reference:

 android:icon="@drawable/"

I found it through running Lint (Analyze -> Inspect code) and it was in Android -> Android Resource Validation as Cannot resolve symbol '@drawable/'