Apply/ExecOn

The name execon is deprecated and only kept for backwards compatibility.

Description

Executes a system command. When the os attribute is specified, then the command is only executed when Apache Ant is run on one of the specified operating systems.

The files and/or directories of a number of Resource Collections – including but not restricted to FileSets, DirSets (since Ant 1.6) or FileLists (since Ant 1.6) – are passed as arguments to the system command.

If you specify a nested mapper, the timestamp of each source file is compared to the timestamp of a target file which is defined by the nested mapper element and searched for in the given dest, if specified.

At least one fileset or filelist is required, and you must not specify more than one mapper.

Note that you cannot interact with the forked program, the only way to send input to it is via the input and inputstring attributes.

Running Ant as a background process on Unix(-like) systems

If you run Ant as a background process (like ant &) and use the <apply> task with spawn set to false, you must provide explicit input to the forked process or Ant will be suspended because it tries to read from the standard input.

Parameters

Parameters specified as nested elements

fileset

You can use any number of nested <fileset> elements to define the files for this task and refer to <fileset>s defined elsewhere.

filelist

Since Ant 1.6

You can use any number of nested <filelist> elements to define the files for this task and refer to <filelist>s defined elsewhere.

dirset

Since Ant 1.6

You can use any number of nested <dirset> elements to define the directories for this task and refer to <dirset>s defined elsewhere.

Any other Resource Collection

since Ant 1.7

You can use any number of nested resource collections.

mapper

A single <mapper> specifies the target files relative to the dest attribute for dependency checking. If the dest attribute is specified it will be used as a base directory for resolving relative pathnames returned by the mapper. At least one <fileset> or <filelist> is required.

arg

Command line arguments should be specified as nested <arg> elements. See Command line arguments.

srcfile

By default the file names of the source files will be added to the end of the command line (unless you set addsourcefile to false). If you need to place it somewhere different, use a nested <srcfile> element between your <arg> elements to mark the insertion point.

targetfile

<targetfile> is similar to <srcfile> and marks the position of the target filename on the command line. If omitted, the target filenames will not be added to the command line at all. This element can only be specified if you also define a nested mapper.

env

It is possible to specify environment variables to pass to the system command via nested <env> elements. See the description in the section about exec

redirector

A nested I/O Redirector can be specified. <apply>'s behavior is like that of exec with regard to redirectors, with the exception that, in non-parallel mode, file mapping will take place with each iteration. This grants the user the capacity to receive input from, and send output to, different files for each sourcefile.

In parallel-mode the redirector will be reset for each batch of executions (with maxparallel > 0) and null will be used a source file just like it is in the case of exec.

Examples

<apply executable="ls">
  <arg value="-l"/>
  <fileset dir="/tmp">
    <patternset>
      <exclude name="**/*.txt"/>
    </patternset>
  </fileset>
  <fileset refid="other.files"/>
</apply>

invokes ls -l, adding the absolute filenames of all files below /tmp not ending in .txt and all files of the FileSet with id other.files to the command line.

<apply executable="somecommand" parallel="false">
  <arg value="arg1"/>
  <srcfile/>
  <arg value="arg2"/>
  <fileset dir="/tmp"/>
</apply>

invokes somecommand arg1 SOURCEFILENAME arg2 for each file in /tmp replacing SOURCEFILENAME with the absolute filename of each file in turn. If parallel had been set to true, SOURCEFILENAME would be replaced with the absolute filenames of all files separated by spaces.

<apply executable="cc" dest="src/C" parallel="false">
  <arg value="-c"/>
  <arg value="-o"/>
  <targetfile/>
  <srcfile/>
  <fileset dir="src/C" includes="*.c"/>
  <mapper type="glob" from="*.c" to="*.o"/>
</apply>

invokes cc -c -o TARGETFILE SOURCEFILE for each .c file that is newer than the corresponding .o, replacing TARGETFILE with the absolute filename of the .o and SOURCEFILE with the absolute name of the .c file.

<mapper id="out" type="glob"
           from="src${file.separator}*.file"
           to="dest${file.separator}*.out"/>

<apply executable="processfile" dest="dest">
  <fileset dir="src" includes="*.file"/>
  <mapper refid="out"/>
  <redirector>
    <outputmapper refid="out"/>
  </redirector>
</apply>

<apply executable="ls" parallel="true"
       force="true" dest="${basedir}" append="true" type="both">
  <path>
    <pathelement path="${env.PATH}"/>
  </path>
  <identitymapper/>
</apply>

<apply executable="jsmin" addsourcefile="false">
    <!-- Collect the JS-files -->
    <fileset dir="src" includes="*.js"/>
    <redirector>
        <!-- redirect STDIN; fileset collects relative to its dir, but we need -->
        <!-- relative to basedir -->
        <inputmapper type="glob" from="*" to="src/*"/>
        <!-- redirect STDOUT to file in dest-dir -->
        <outputmapper id="out" type="glob" from="*.js" to="dest/*.js"/>
    </redirector>
</apply>