Question

What are ant primitives?

In my build.xml I am using a statements like:

<fileset dir="${basedir}/lib">
<fileset dir="${src.test.dir}" includes="**/*.class" />

how does ant know that “src.test.dir” is same as ./test-java?

Where can I find the list of ant primitives?

Answer 1

It knows because someone has previously defined that variable/propery manually. Search your build file and see where the src.test.dir property gets defined. It should be something like:

<!-- Source directory for tests -->
<property name="src.test.dir" value="${basedir}/test-java"/>

By default, ant has only a limited set of properties as described here