In gradle tasks of type Exec, why do commandLine and executable behave differently?

Question

Does anyone know why in tasks of type `Exec` `commandline` and `executable` behave differently in terms of inheriting environment vars? For example, I cannot run this Task because Gradle fails to find ruby from my environment: ``` task checkRubyVersionCommandLine(type: Exec) { commandLine 'ruby -v' } ``` Yet this works fine: ``` task checkRubyVersionExecute(type: Exec) { executable = 'ruby' args = ['-v'] } ``` What is `commandLine` for, or how can I get it to pick up the variables from the shell it is executed from? Why does `executable` just work?

Accepted Answer

When using the `commandLine`, you need to split the string on spaces, else the executable becomes `ruby -v`, instead of `ruby`.

So try this instead:

```
task checkRubyVersionExecute(type: Exec) {
  commandLine 'ruby', '-v'
}
```

See the code here to see how the Exec task handles this.

In gradle tasks of type Exec, why do commandLine and executable behave differently?

Solution

Problem