Copying a list of files in Ant

One might think that such an everyday task as copying a list of files would be trivial in Ant. Not so - it's a bloody nightmare.

1. First attempt: creating a FileList would seem to be what you want. Nope - the Copy task doesn't support FileLists. Why?????
2. Second attempt: create a FileSet (with the usual substitution of angle brackets....would it be too much to ask to have a blog site that doesn't stuff up xml?):



[copy todir="foo"]
  [fileset dir="bar"]
     [filename name="pathfrombarto/file"/]
     [filename name="differentpathfrombarto/file2"/]
  [/fileset]
[/copy]


Nope - the filenames are mutually exclusive - the fileset does an "and" on them, and since your files won't match both names, it copies nothing. Ridiculous.

In any case, the fact that you're forced to use a FileSet and its pattern matching means that if you have a large set of files below "dir" (e.g. a Maven repository) then the above takes an age.

The solution, incidentally, is:

[copy todir="foo"]
  [fileset dir="bar"]
    [or]
     [filename name="pathfrombarto/file"/]
     [filename name="differentpathfrombarto/file2"/]
    [/or]
  [/fileset]
[/copy]

Though it still takes an age to process.