Question

I am running an Ant command like:

<delete dir="/some/folder/path/"/>

The folder /path/ contains some files, folders and some symlinks. The files and folders are deleted but the command tries to delete the target directories of the symlinks which gives an error.

I don’t want to delete the target directories but only the symlinks when I run the <delete> command on the parent folder (/path/).

Answer 1

I found this bugreport.

A solution is to use fileset.

<delete>
  <fileset dir="/some/folder/path/" followsymlinks="false"/>
</delete>

Edit: the above does not delete symlinks, though. The following deletes all symlinks in a folder. I found it here.

<exec output="/path/to/symlink/list" executable="/usr/bin/find">
    <arg value="/some/folder/path/"/>
    <arg value="-type"/>
    <arg value="l"/>
</exec>

<fileset id="victims" dir="/some/folder/path/">
    <includesfile name="/path/to/symlink/list>
</fileset> 

After this it should be safe to use delete dir.