How to append some text at the end of a file using ant?

Question

I am writing a build script for my project. In one of the configuration files I need to append some text. So I am looking for some options in ant to do this.

I have got one option to find something and replace that text with all of your new text and the old values. But it does not seems to be promising, as if in future someone changes the original file the build tool will fail.

So I would like my script to add the text at the end of the file. What options do I have for such a requirement?

Answer 1

Use the echo task:

<echo file="file.txt" append="true">Hello World</echo>

EDIT: If you have HTML (or other arbitrary XML) you should escape it with CDATA:

<echo file="file.txt" append="true">
<![CDATA[
  <h1>Hello World</h1>
]]>
</echo>

Answer 2

Another option would be to use a filterchain.

For example, the following will append file input2.txt to input1.txt and write the result to output.txt. The line separators for the current operating system (from the java properties available in ant) are used in the output file. Before using this you would have to create output2.txt on the fly I guess.

<copy file="input1.txt" tofile="output.txt" >
    <filterchain>
        <concatfilter append="input2.txt" />
        <tokenfilter delimoutput="${line.separator}" />
    </filterchain>
</copy>