Error: /usr/bin/ld: warning: i386 architecture of input file

I received the below error when attempting to run a setup.py script to finish installing a certain application. The application was being installed on a 64-bit CentOS Linux system and during the initial part of the install I had attempted to use 32-bit python which ended up causing a bunch of errors. After I believed that all of the errors were corrected I still received an i386 error message. Since I am not very familiar with Python setup scripts it took me a couple minutes to figure out what needed to be done.

Python setup.py Error: /usr/bin/ld: warning: i386 architecture of input file

I was able to easily resolve the problem by clearing the setup.py cache and then simply issuing the command again. If you run into this error issue the below command to clean the application installation cache and start over.

Clean setup.py Cache:

./setup.py clean

I apologize for the lack of information in this article and the fact that it is extremely short however I had made a note a long time ago to write an article about this and forgot to include all of the shell output in the note. I hope that someone stumbles across the error above and simply needs to issue the “setup.py clean” command to resolve their problem. If anyone has more insight into the issue please feel free to leave comments below.