Trouble launching ant exec task

[Dave Alvarado]

Hi,

I'm using Ant 1.7 on Mac 10.6.3. In my .bash_profile, I have defined an alias called "restart", that runs some commands. I would like to execute this same alias in my ant task, but '<exec executable="restart" />' isn't working. Here is my larger target ...

<target name="compile" depends="check-files-modified" unless="rebuild.notrequired">
        <!-- START General Compile -->
        <mkdir dir="${classes}/build"/>
        <javac debug="true" srcdir="${src}" destdir="${classes}/build" classpath="${libs}" />
        <jar destfile="${classes}/lvcva.jar" basedir="${classes}/build">
                <metainf dir="${src}/META-INF"/>
        </jar>
        <exec executable="restart" />
        <delete dir="${classes}/build"/>
        <!-- END General Compile -->
</target>

Instead I get the error ...

/Users/davea/projects/LVCVA/LVCVA/ant/build.xml:293: Execute failed: java.io.IOException: Cannot run program "restart" (in directory "/Users/davea/projects/LVCVA/LVCVA/ant"): error=2, No such file or directory

Any ideas what I can do to address the problem? Thanks, - Dave

[Peter Johnson]

I don't think you can <exec> an alias. An alias is something defined to bash and is specific to bash, whereas <exec> communicates to the OS (not to bash). So try <exec>ing bash, passing the alias to bash.

[Dave Alvarado]

You mean pass in "bash" as the executable and have my aliased command as my argument? - Dave

[David Newton]

Or define it as a shell script as opposed to an alias--arguably cleaner.

[Dave Alvarado]

So when I do this

        <exec dir="/Library/Tomcat/Home/bin/" executable="bash">
                <arg value="shutdown.sh"/>
        </exec>
        <exec dir="/Library/Tomcat/Home/bin/" executable="bash">
                <arg value="startup.sh"/>
        </exec>

is the second exec waiting for the first to complete? If not, how can I force that? Also, normally I see output from these commands but I don't when I run the ant task. Anyway to get it pipe the output to the terminal?

Thanks, - Dave

[David Newton]

Why not use the Tomcat Ant tasks?

[Peter Johnson]

Dave Alvarado wrote:You mean pass in "bash" as the executable and have my aliased command as my argument? - Dave

Yes. Check out the -c option in the bash man pages.

Also, you can run a script directly via <exec>, you do not have to do it via bash.