What is the meaning of '$' in build.gradle script

Question

I am reading documentation about native builds. And there is a following example for building all variants.

model {
    tasks {
        buildAllExecutables(Task) {
            dependsOn $.binaries.findAll { it.buildable }
        }
    }
}

Link to documentation

What is the meaning of this dollar sign before binaries container?

Answer 1

The $. notation is a way to reference other elements of the model. By "the model" I mean all the stuff you see when you run gradle model. So when we do $.binaries we are telling Gradle to go searching for a model element named "binaries". As another example, I could use $.tasks.foo to reference the task named "foo".

See the documentation for more details.