I started with an Intellij Android project that worked on another machine, but when i rebuilt the project i got an error saying
"android-apt-compiler:/pk/android/android-sdk-linux/platform-tools/aapt": error=2, No such file or directory"
it turned out that the problem was that the aapt is a 32 bit program, so when i did
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
and restarted intellij things worked again, and I could build my project again.
this way I installed loads of 32bit libraries i probably did not need, but it worked.
unix command file on the aapt file combined with google found answers related to eclipse (where a corresponding error message was much more useful, but mentioning a missing library) helped me find this out.
was this useful for anyone?