Question

How within Apache Ant can I filter OUT only lines that don’t begin with INSERT like I believe is possible (see below) with grep.

cat specialtable.inserts.sql | grep INSERT > specialtable.inserts.ONLY.sql

Answer 1

You can use the linecontains or linecontainsregexp filter readers

<copy file="specialtable.inserts.sql" tofile="specialtable.inserts.ONLY.sql">
  <filterchain>
    <linecontains>
      <contains value="INSERT"/>
    </linecontains>
  </filterchain>
</copy>

If you wanted to filter the file to include all lines that contain INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE then use linecontainsregexp:

<copy file="specialtable.inserts.sql" tofile="specialtable.inserts.ONLY.sql">
  <filterchain>
    <linecontainsregexp>
       <regexp pattern="INSERT|UPDATE|DELETE"/>
    </linecontainsregexp>
  </filterchain>
</copy>

You could also use the casesensitive attribute and a more complex REGEX expression to ensure that the lines start with those words.