Question

I have the following ant target:

  <delete>
    <fileset dir="${qnaire_dir}" includes="**/*~" />
  </delete>

It does not delete the following files:

./DETAILS~
./qnaire/__init__.py~
./qtest.py~
./README~

What is the correct includes value to match these files?

Answer 1

I found the answer! The syntax I was looking for:

  <defaultexcludes remove="**/*~" />
  <delete>
    <fileset dir="${qnaire_dir}" includes="**/*~" />
  </delete>
  <defaultexcludes default="true" />

After skimming the ant documentation for the delete task (http://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/delete.html) half a dozen times, I finally actually noticed this statement:

If you use this task to delete temporary files created by editors and it doesn’t seem to work, read
up on the default exclusion set in Directory-based Tasks, and see the defaultexcludes attribute
below.

So I went and read about defaultexludes. Turns out that by default ant excludes a set of file expressions from all directory based tasks. These are listed here: http://ant.apache.org/manual/dirtasks.html#defaultexcludes

Adding the first defaultexludes element and removing ‘*~’ from the list allows the subsequent delete task to do the right thing. The second defaultexcludes element puts the default exclusion list back in place.