Question

I have a utility build script that gets called from a variety of project-specific build scripts on a build server. Everything works fine, until the relative directory structure changes. That is:

trunk/
    utilities/
        imported.xml
        some_resource_file
    projectName/
        importing.xml

works just fine, but sometimes we need:

trunk/
    importing.xml
    utilities/
        imported.xml
        some_resource_file
    projectName/

The problem is that imported.xml needs some_resource_file and currently gets to it by referring to ../utilities/some_resource_file. This obviously works in the first case because the working directory is a sibling of utilities.

Is there a simple way for imported.xml to know what directory it’s in, something equivalent to dirname $0 in bash? Or do I have to do I have to somehow inject this from the importing script?

Answer 1

Make sure that imported.xml defines project with name attribute. Then you can use that name for an absolute path to the ant file through ant.file.name property.

I have capitalized IMPORTED, so you can easily see it in the code.

<project
  name="IMPORTED"
>
  <dirname
    property="IMPORTED.basedir"
    file="${ant.file.IMPORTED}"
  />
  <property name="myresource"
    location="${IMPORTED.basedir}/some_resource_file"
  />
</project>