Ant User Manual

Apply

Description

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

The files and/or directories of a number of FileSets are passed as arguments to the system command. The timestamp of each source file is compared to the timestamp of a target file which is defined by a nested mapper element. At least one fileset and exactly one mapper element are required.

Parameters

Attribute	Description	Required
executable	the command to execute without any command line arguments.	Yes
dest	the directory where the target files will be placed.	Yes
dir	the directory in which the command should be executed.	No
os	list of Operating Systems on which the command may be executed.	No
output	the file to which the output of the command should be redirected.	No
timeout	Stop the command if it doesn't finish within the specified time (given in milliseconds).	No
failonerror	Stop the buildprocess if the command exits with a returncode other than 0.	No
newenvironment	Do not propagate old environment when new environment variables are specified.	No, default is false
skipemptyfilesets	Don't run the command, if no source files have been found or are newer than their corresponding target files.	No, default is false
parallel	Run the command only once, appending all files as arguments. If false, command will be executed once for every file. Defaults to false.	No
type	One of file, dir or both. If set to file, only the names of plain files will be sent to the command. If set to dir, only the names of directories are considered.	No, default is file

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.

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. 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.

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

Please note that the environment of the current Ant process is not passed to the system command if you specify variables using <env>.

Examples

<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.