Ant execute a command

Question

I use Silk4J and in my build, I have to start the agent. The command I use is:

<exec spawn="true" executable="${env.OPEN_AGENT_HOME}/agent/openAgent.exe" />

It gives me this error

The ' characters around the executable and arguments are not part of the command. 

Do I need to change it?

Answer 1

It is good practice to wrap logged entries in single quotes so that if an entry is empty you can still see it, for example:

No password for user ''

Otherwise you would see:

No password for user

which is misleading. In this case it only informs you that the quotes are only there for this reason and not part of the logged data. I think the sentence is slightly confusing because of the negative form 'are not part of the command' which looks like there is a problem...

Answer 2

The message doesn't signify an error.

When the -v, -verbose, -d, or -debug option is given to Ant, the <exec> task outputs the command it is executing along with the message:

 [exec] Current OS is Windows 7
 [exec] Executing 'cmd' with arguments:
 [exec] '/c'
 [exec] '@for %a in (C:\src\ant\ant-dir-file-local) do @echo %~ta'
 [exec]
 [exec] The ' characters around the executable and arguments are
 [exec] not part of the command.
 [exec] 10/23/2013 02:36 AM

Breaking down the above example...

 [exec] Executing 'cmd' with arguments:
                  ^   ^ 
 [exec] '/c'
        ^  ^
 [exec] '@for %a in (C:\src\ant\ant-dir-file-local) do @echo %~ta'
        ^                                                        ^

In this case, the single quotes (') above each ^ aren't part of the command. Ant wraps the executable name and each argument with single quotes to make it clear what is part of the command and what isn't. Ant does this to help users debug their Ant scripts when <exec> doesn't behave as expected. The message is purely informational.