Apache Ant command line arguments without double quotes - is it possible?

Question

Today I had to add a task to an Apache Ant file. The command line should have been something like

myprogram --param1 --param2 path\somefile 2> path\logfile

The problem with this was that if I used something like the following for this

<exec executable="$(myprogram)"
  <arg value="--param1">
  <arg value="--param2">
  <arg path="$(somefile)">
  <arg value="2>">
  <arg path="$(logfile)">
</exec>

all arguments were quoted, so the command looked like this:

myprogram "--param1" "--param2" "path\somefile" "2>" "path\logfile"

which is not bad and especially nice if you have spaces in your files/path, but destroys the pipe to the logfile (instead, the program thinks there are two additional file arguments "2>" and "path\logfile").

I worked around this by calling a batch script instead that only wants the files as parameters, but I wondered: Is it possible to do this without such a workaround?

Answer 1

Have you tried <arg line="..." />?

Answer 2

When you run "myprogram --param1 --param2 path\somefile 2> path\logfile", the arguments to your program end at "2>". File redirection is an operation of your shell, which isn't being used from within ant. If you look at the docs for the ant exec task, you'll see that it supports redirection via the output attribute.

Answer 3

The ant exec task has an output parameter where you could specify the log file without requiring the command line piping, combined with the parameter append to determine if the output file should be overwritten or appended to.