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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-06T05:17:06+00:00

For months now I’ve been having an intermittent problem where, during my ant build,

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For months now I’ve been having an intermittent problem where, during my ant build, one of the jar files it produces is 0 bytes in size. This 0-byte jar file ends up getting packaged in my ear file, and the subsequent deployment fails. My project structure looks like this:

myProj
    myProj-common
    myProj-ejb
    myProj-web

The resulting build directory contains these files

lib
    myProj-common.jar  <-- sometimes 0 bytes
META-INF
   application.xml
   MANIFEST.MF
myProj-common.jar <-- never 0 bytes
myProj-ejb.jar
myProj-web.war

It is the myProj-common.jar file in lib that is 0 bytes. The one in the main build directory is always the correct size. It’s unclear to me why I have two copies of the jar file in the end result. All of the ant build scripts were automatically generated by NetBeans.

I’m still learning the ins and outs of ant build files, so it’s not entirely clear to me why they’re so complex. I’ve written a somewhat minimal alternate build.xml file that I use for building the software in our Hudson environment on a Solaris server. That build never has this problem.

After upgrading from NetBeans 7.0.1 to 7.1.1, the problem has gotten a lot more frequent, and occurs whether I build the project inside of NetBeans or on the command line. The system where I’m having this problem runs Windows XP. With NB 7.0.1 I had a bad build perhaps one time in six. Now I have a -good- build maybe one time in ten.

Any pointers on where I should be looking to debug this would be most appreciated.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    This appears to be a conflict with our whole-disk encryption software, PGP Desktop. Recently it was running in a degraded mode on my laptop, which slowed my builds down considerably, but then I never saw the problem arise. My speculation is that this left time for the lower level drivers to complete whatever actions they were taking and flush their write buffers. It looks like right now the jar file is getting copied before the write buffer flushes and therefore a 0-byte file is getting copied. Ant never sees an error, which is why there’s no failure in the build process.

    Unfortunately there’s not much I can do, except perhaps modify the build script to throw in a delay before the jar file gets copied. Right now my workaround is to manually copy the jar after a full Clean and Build, then run Build (as opposed to Clean and Build), which only takes a few seconds to repackage the ear file.

    I think the reason the problem got more prevalent when I upgraded NetBeans is that some change in the IDE made the builds run faster, and thus I ran into the buffering problem more often.

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