How to execute a command with multiple parameters from a file in gradle? - unix

Question

I have below command in a .txt-file:
java -jar /path/to/something.jar --classpath="/path/to/something/other.jar" --url="something:#127.0.0.1:1234:TEST12" --driver=some.driver update
As can be seen multiple parameters with different syntax (with -, --, and/or with and without "") are used.
I tried the following code:
task test(type: Exec) {
workingDir '/path/to/working/dir'
String commandFromFile = new File('/path/to/file/with/command' + 'filewithcommand.txt').getText('UTF-8')
commandLine commandFromFile
}
On windows platforms this code is working but on unix it doesn't.

Answer 1

As you can see in the documentation of the Exec task, you should split up your command into its parts. So doing commandLine commandFromFile.split(' ') should work if you do not have spaces in your arguments. If you have, you need a more sophisticated way to split the command that takes quotes into account.
Or you change the format of your command file so that it has one argument per line and you use .readLines('UTF-8') instead of .getText('UTF-8').
I'm not 100% sure about the following, but it could be that you also have to remove the quoting around arguments even if they contain spaces, as you give the arguments as single entities to the commandLine call and thus need no quoting for escaping spaces here. Depending on OS and tool you call it could even break the command if there are quotes that it cannot handle.
Alternatively, but that is the worse method imho, you can also do something like
if (windows) {
commandLine 'cmd', '/c', commandFromFile
} else {
commandLine 'sh', '-c', commandFromFile
}
where then the command processor does the splitting and so on. There you need the quotes and stuff of course. The windows variable in this example of course needs to be determined, e. g. from system properties.