How to check if directory exists before deleting it, using ANT?

Question

Using ANT, how can i make sure that directory exists before attempting to remove it?

As part of my current clean task, i

<target name="clean" description="clean">     <delete dir="${build}" />     <delete dir="${bin}" />     <delete dir="${dist}/myrunner.${version}.jar" />     <delete dir="${doc}" />     <delete dir="${report}" /> </target> 

This works well, however (obviously) remove happens when there is something to remove.

Using ANT, how can i check if directory exist?

Answer 1

For this specific case, I'm not going to answer the question "how to find if a directory exists", because that's already been answered, but I'm just going to point out that in your clean task you can use failonerror="false" to keep the ant task from exiting. This should be suitable in a clean task because if there's nothing to clean, it should not be a problem.

    <target name="clean" description="clean">         <delete dir="${build}" failonerror="false"/>         ....         <delete dir="${report}" failonerror="false"/>     </target> 

This is useful if you don't want to install ant-contrib or can't for some reason.

Answer 2

with vanilla ant you would use something like =

 <target name="check">   <condition property="deldir">     <available file="${somedir}" type="dir"/>   </condition>  </target>   <target name="deldir" depends="check" if="deldir">  <delete dir="${somedir}"/>     <!-- .. -->  </target> 

else see = Ant check existence for a set of files
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