3th day with ant , help please

[Hussein Baghdadi]

Hi all.
I am learning ant and encountered these questions:
1. the default target for my build file is "packageing", which package the the class files and produce an executable jar file.
ok, but I found in ant manual that we must provide a cleanup target which deletes some dirs :
<target name="clean">
<delete dir="${buildDir}" />
<delete dir="${distDir}" />
</target>
when running ant again , the clean target doesn't run (I mean , these dirs didnt delete), so can you explain what should I do ?
indead, if we delete these dirs, and lost our executable files, so why we provide this target??
2. Then I have cahenged the default target and put instead of "run target" which invokes the java command on my main class.
when running ant , its running the application , but the application terminates in one second.
so what??

[Tony Yan]

you need to specify the depends attribute in all those targets to build their dependencies. Check Ant Manual for details. The idea is that if your default target is 'clean_up', then make sure it depends on other targets, which then will be run themselves.