Question

In ant copy task, in destination location there is a “random number” folder in the path. When i try to put a * in the path to handle it, Ant takes it literally, ie doesnt expand it, but creates a folder called “*” and copies there. How do I tell Ant to expand the * to actual folder name there (there is only 1 folder in there, so * wont expand to multiple folders)

<property name="dest" value="a/*/b/my.jar" />
<property name="src" value="my.jar" />

<copy file="${src}" tofile="${dest}" overwrite="true" verbose="true"/>

Answer 1

The copy task doesn’t support wildcards in the tofile attribute. If the destination directory exists, but the destination file may not, then you can use a dirset to capture the directory. Something like:

<dirset dir="${basedir}" id="dest.dir">
      <include name="a/*/b" />
</dirset>
<property name="dest" value="${toString:dest.dir}/my.jar"/>
<property name="src" value="my.jar" />

<copy file="${src}" tofile="${dest}" overwrite="true" verbose="true"/>

Instead of using the property helper (${toString:....}) syntax you might use the pathconvert task:

<pathconvert property="destdir" refid="dest.dir"/>
<property name="dest" value="${destdir}/my.jar"/>