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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T18:53:18+00:00

Update : I am using Ant 1.8.1 on Windows XP. I am trying to

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Update: I am using Ant 1.8.1 on Windows XP.

I am trying to write an Ant master build file for multiple projects. I can successfully create a jar for each project, and I want to package all of these jars into a single tar.gz file. Each jar file is located within the bin subdirectory of its respective project, but this path could be changed in the future. I’ve tried something like this:

<tar destfile="foo.tar.gz" compression="gzip" >
   <tarfileset dir=".">
      <include name="**/*.jar" />
   </tarfileset>
</tar>

…which kind of works. The only problem is that it maintains the directory structure within the jar. I want a flat file. So instead of:

foo.tar.gz
   project1
      bin
         project1.jar
   project2
      bin
         project2.jar
etc...

I need:

foo.tar.gz
   project1.jar
   project2.jar

I attempted to use Ant’s copy task to copy these jar files to a temporary directory and then tar them from there. However, the copy operation replicates paths within the target directory. So, same problem.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I think you’re almost there, having assembled a flattened directory of your files. What remains is to get rid of the tarfileset element, which is there specifically for preserving/inserting structure. I think tar and zip tasks work fine with embedded fileset elements.

    The documentation bears me out on this – up until 1.7 fileset was the embedded resource element that could be used in place of tarfileset.

    Come to think of it, I think that once you switch to fileset, you may no longer need to temp-copy your files for flattening.

    EDIT:

    I just built and ran this buildfile:

    <project name="tartest" default="teer">
   <target name="teer">
      <tar destfile="tartest.tar">
     <fileset dir="../Downloads" includes="*.ico *.gif"/>
      </tar>
   </target>
</project>

    and there was no trace of the original directory in the archive:

    -rw-r--r-- 0/0            3487 2009-12-28 20:04 actor075_thumb.gif
-rw-r--r-- 0/0            1456 2010-06-16 10:57 bea-logo.gif
-rw-r--r-- 0/0           23800 2010-06-16 09:22 ejb1.gif
-rw-r--r-- 0/0            1406 2010-05-15 10:40 favicon-beta.ico
-rw-r--r-- 0/0            1406 2010-05-15 10:25 favicon-clown.ico
-rw-r--r-- 0/0            1406 2008-12-06 01:08 favicon.ico

    Also, tar -xvf tartest.tar dumped the tarred files in my current directory.

    So… what are you doing differently that is causing different results for you?

    EDIT 2:

    More insight gained from re-reading your question. I’d completely sidestepped the problem of source paths generated by **/* wildcards.

    Since you’re already considering copying those jar files to a temporary directory, all that’s missing is to use the flatten attribute on the copy task. That should fix you up.

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