I'm trying to copy a directory using the Ant copy task.
I am a newbie at Ant; my current solution is:
<copy todir="${release_dir}/lib">
<fileset dir="${libpath}" />
</copy>
I'm wondering if there is a better and shorter way to accomplish the same thing?
First of all, those are the examples from Ant documentation:
Copy a directory to another directory
<copy todir="../new/dir">
<fileset dir="src_dir"/>
</copy>
Copy a set of files to a directory
<copy todir="../dest/dir">
<fileset dir="src_dir">
<exclude name="**/*.java"/>
</fileset>
</copy>
<copy todir="../dest/dir">
<fileset dir="src_dir" excludes="**/*.java"/>
</copy>
Copy a set of files to a directory, appending .bak to the file name on the fly
<copy todir="../backup/dir">
<fileset dir="src_dir"/>
<globmapper from="*" to="*.bak"/>
</copy>
Secondly, here is the whole documentation about copy task.
Just because the docs were not very clear to me, and because the time I spent can serve others:
The docs say that this "copies a directory (dir1) to another directory (dest)":
<copy todir="../new/dest">
<fileset dir="src/dir1"/>
</copy>
Actually, this does not mean "copy dir1 inside dest", but rather "copy the contents of dir1 inside dest".
(In general, in Ant, the "root dir" of a filesets -as well at the todir attribute- is not considered as being part of the set itself.)
To place the directory dir1 inside dest one has several alternatives (none totally satisfying to me - and I'd imagined that the new DirSet would help here, but no)
<copy todir="../new/dest/dir1">
<fileset dir="src/dir1"/>
</copy>
or
<copy todir="../new/dest">
<fileset dir="src" includes="dir1/**"/>
</copy>
This will do it:
<copy todir="directory/to/copy/to">
<fileset dir="directory/to/copy/from"/>
</copy>
The ant manual is your friend: Ant Manual, in this case: Copy Task
From http://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/copy.html:
<copy todir="../new/dir">
<fileset dir="src_dir"/>
</copy>
