Question

I am working on a NANT build project to build a VS project. One of the build file has a property definition like this:

<property name="App.dir" 
  value ="${directory::get-current-directory()}\Source\App"/>

This property value has been used in many other places. For example:

<exec program=".\test.exe"  workingdir=".">
  <arg line="${App.dir}\project1\resources\res1.resx /arg2"/>

Here I need to use <arg line=…> instead of <arg value=…> is to pass specified 2 arguments to text.exe.

when I build this NANT project on another developer’s machine, I got a build failure. Finally I found out that the ${App.dir} on that developer’s machine is a path in long-form and there is a space in the path. As a result, the arguments to text.exe were actually 3 or more.

I am not sure if there is any way to convert the ${App.dir} path to short name with no spaces:

<property name="App.dir" value ="????"/>

where ???? is something to convert “${directory::get-current-directory()}\Source\App” to a path name in a short-form. Is there any way to do that?

I am using NANT in Windows XP. In Unix/Cgywin, there is one function to get dos name:

cygpath::get-dos-path

Can I use this one in my NANT build file?

Answer 1

Use <arg value=””>, from the NANT docs:

value – A single command-line argument; can contain space characters.