Comments on: Tip: How to see all available Ant targets

By: Muthu Ramadoss

Muthu Ramadoss — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 15:52:49 +0000

One last time..

[sara@notebookws114 Temp]$ cat build.xml

By: Muthu Ramadoss

Muthu Ramadoss — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 15:49:10 +0000

[sara@notebookws114 Temp]$ cat build.xml

By: Muthu Ramadoss

Muthu Ramadoss — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 15:45:15 +0000

>> I have to add one small caveat though to the above tip. Ant considers a public target to be one with a description. If the description attribute is missing, you will not see the target listed in the output.

Incorrect. Not true always…

[sara@notebookws114 Temp]$ ant -version
Apache Ant version 1.7.0 compiled on December 13 2006

[sara@notebookws114 Temp]$ cat build.xml

[sara@notebookws114 Temp]$ ant -p
Buildfile: build.xml

Main targets:

Other targets:

no-desc
[sara@notebookws114 Temp]$

By: Chris Johnston

Chris Johnston — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 03:53:41 +0000

Thanks for the tips. I tried the tab-tab one and it even worked on Windows. I added the shorter version (ant -p) to my tip above.

By: Sualeh Fatehi

Sualeh Fatehi — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 15:27:37 +0000

If you find yourself using this command often, you may want to use the abbreviation: ant -p

By: Nate

Nate — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 07:07:24 +0000

Ugh, html stripping took out my lovely fake tabs…
That was ‘ant’ followed by tab tab. ‘ant c’ followed by tab.

By: Nate

Nate — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 07:04:06 +0000

That’s a good one across the board. I also discovered on an earlier project that (at least with an Ubuntu setup), tab completion/searching of ant targets is available at the command line. ‘ant’ lists them out, ‘ant c’ will recommend ‘clean’, ‘compile’, etc. with successive tabs.