In gradle tasks of type Exec, why do commandLine and executable behave differently?

Question

Does anyone know why in tasks of type Exec commandline and executable behave differently in terms of inheriting environment vars?

For example, I cannot run this Task because Gradle fails to find ruby from my environment:

task checkRubyVersionCommandLine(type: Exec) {        commandLine 'ruby -v' } 

Yet this works fine:

task checkRubyVersionExecute(type: Exec) {     executable = 'ruby'      args = ['-v'] } 

What is commandLine for, or how can I get it to pick up the variables from the shell it is executed from? Why does executable just work?

Answer 1

When using the commandLine, you need to split the string on spaces, else the executable becomes 'ruby -v', instead of 'ruby'.

So try this instead:

task checkRubyVersionExecute(type: Exec) {   commandLine 'ruby', '-v' } 

See the code here to see how the Exec task handles this.