NewInstance

With ant it's possible to create macros and use them like standard ant tasks.
For instance, in a previous project I was using a proprietary build tool that needed to be launched at the command line. So I created an ant script that was launching that tool from eclipse, and to reuse the invocation logic I created a list of ant macros built one on top of the others; having those scripts helped me to integrate in eclipse the whole development cycle; and finally I ended up starting firefox from ant...
I propose here the lower end of that macros: executing a bash command from ant, and a sample usage.

<property name="env.java.home" value="/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun" />

<macrodef name="bash">
    <attribute name="command" />
    <sequential>
        <exec dir="/bin" executable="/bin/bash">
            <env key="JAVA_HOME" value="${env.java.home}"/>
            <arg line="-c '@{command}'" />
        </exec>
    </sequential>
</macrodef>

Sample usage:
 <bash command="cd ${env.va.home}; ./va -m${manifest} ${operation}" />

To execute multiple commands for the bash task, it's possible to separate them using ";". Tipically: "cd workdir ; ./dosomething".