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Date: Wed, 08 Nov 2000 10:39:13 +1100
To: ant-dev@jakarta.apache.org
From: Peter Donald <donaldp@apache.org>
Subject: Re: Thoughts on an 'open' task
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At 12:37  7/11/00 -0800, you wrote:
>I seem to have need of an 'open' task in some of my targets which would take
>a file and based on its type bring it up in the appropriate app. For
>example, <open file="results.html" wait="false"> would spawn a viewer for an
>HTML file without caring what the reference viewer app is.
>
>Doing that on Windows is fairly easy with a 10 line wrapper application
>"open.exe" to do the right thing. But I wouldnt know where to begin on
>Unix/Linux/Mac.

can also call start.exe on windows. For someplatform/windows environments I
know there is an equivelent. GNOME has a mime type registry and can launch
apps from. If KDE and Mac platforms had equivelent then we could do such a
thing I believe. Thou it may be better to have it look like

<open url="file:results.html" mimetype="text/html" wait="false" />

The mimetype would only be for systems that can not auto guess mimetype
based on extention.

>If there is a solution to doing it on most platforms then it would make
>sense for me to turn it into a re-usable task, otherwise it might as well
>remain a single platform trick I can do using exec.
>
>Any suggestions for cross platform solutions?

I don't know how to do it but it could be done ;)

Cheers,

Pete

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