How can I apply a timeout to an Ant task?

ant, timeout

Solution

You might use the parallel task, which has a timeout, with a parallel degree of one:

<target name="timed_del">
    <parallel threadCount="1" timeout="300000">
        <sequential>
            ... your tasks here ...
        </sequential>
    </parallel>
</target>

Problem

Without writing a custom Ant task, is there a way to use a timeout on a regular ant target? To give some background info: we are using the 'delete' task to remove the contents of a given directory. Sometimes this directory is massive, with lots of generated folders and files. We wanted to have that task timeout after, say, 5 minutes.

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