Use Ant for running program with command line arguments

Question

My program getting command line arguments. How can I pass it when I use Ant?

Answer 1

Extending Richard Cook's answer.

Here's the ant task to run any program (including, but not limited to Java programs):

<target name="run">    <exec executable="name-of-executable">       <arg value="${arg0}"/>       <arg value="${arg1}"/>    </exec> </target> 

Here's the task to run a Java program from a .jar file:

<target name="run-java">    <java jar="path for jar">       <arg value="${arg0}"/>       <arg value="${arg1}"/>    </java> </target> 

You can invoke either from the command line like this:

ant -Darg0=Hello -Darg1=World run 

Make sure to use the -Darg syntax; if you ran this:

ant run arg0 arg1 

then ant would try to run targets arg0 and arg1.

Answer 2

If you do not want to handle separate properties for each possible argument, I suggest you'd use:

<arg line="${args}"/> 

You can check if the property is not set using a specific target with an unless attribute and inside do:

<input message="Type the desired command line arguments:" addProperty="args"/> 

Putting it all together gives:

<target name="run" depends="compile, input-runargs" description="run the project">   <!-- You can use exec here, depending on your needs -->   <java classname="Main">     <arg line="${args}"/>   </java> </target> <target name="input-runargs" unless="args" description="prompts for command line arguments if necessary">   <input addProperty="args" message="Type the desired command line arguments:"/> </target> 

You can use it as follows:

ant ant run ant run -Dargs='--help' 

The first two commands will prompt for the command-line arguments, whereas the latter won't.