Question

I’m trying to write an MsBuild script to zip some files up. I need to select all of the read-only files recursively from a folder into an ItemGroup to add to the zip.

I’m using the community tasks Zip task, but am struggling with selecting files based on their attributes.

Is there anything around to do this out of the box, or do I need to write a custom task?

Thanks for you help.

Answer 1

This seems to do the job with a bit of dirty command line usage.

<Exec Command="dir .\RelPath\ToFolder\ToSearchIn /S /AR /B > readonlyfiles.temp.txt"/>
<ReadLinesFromFile File="readonlyfiles.temp.txt">
    <Output TaskParameter="Lines" ItemName="ReadOnlyFiles"/>
</ReadLinesFromFile>
<Delete Files="readonlyfiles.temp.txt"/>

That gives absolute paths to the files.

To get relative paths, try something like this:

<Exec Command="dir .\RelPath\ToFolder\ToSearchIn /S /AR /B > readonlyfiles.temp.txt"/>
<FileUpdate Files="readonlyfiles.temp.txt"
            Multiline="True"
            Regex="^.*\\RelPath\\ToFolder\\ToSearchIn"
            ReplacementText="RelPath\ToFolder\ToSearchIn"
            />
<ReadLinesFromFile File="readonlyfiles.temp.txt">
    <Output TaskParameter="Lines" ItemName="ReadOnlyZipFiles"/>
</ReadLinesFromFile>
<Delete Files="readonlyfiles.temp.txt"/>