I ran into trouble with a ‘JavaExec’ these days. The tasks was rather straight-forward, but one argument contained quotation marks.
Consider this simple echo service:
package some.echo
class Service {
public static void main(String[] args) {
args.each { println it }
}
}
Compiling and calling the service with these two tasks gives the following output.
task a(type: JavaExec) {
classpath = project.files(
project.sourceSets.main.output,
project.configurations.runtime
)
main = “some.echo.Service”
args = [ “the “argu” ment”]
}
task b(type: JavaExec) {
classpath = project.files(
project.sourceSets.main.output,
project.configurations.runtime
)
main = “some.echo.Service”
args = [ “the ““argu”” ment” ]
}
Note the double quotation marks in task ‘b’.
For task ‘a’ the output is:
the argu ment
For task ‘b’ it is:
the “argu” ment
I’d have expected that ‘a’ already gives the desired outcome.
I can’t reproduce this with Gradle 1.6.
Here’s what I tried:
apply plugin: "application"
apply plugin: "groovy"
mainClassName = "Main"
repositories {
mavenCentral()
}
dependencies {
groovy localGroovy()
}
run {
args = [ "the \"argu\" ment" ]
}
Then run: ‘gradle run’.
The arg is quoted.
I still see this with gradle 1.6 with the ‘run’ task as well as with my example of ‘JavaExec’.
% gradle run
:compileJava UP-TO-DATE
:compileGroovy UP-TO-DATE
:processResources UP-TO-DATE
:classes UP-TO-DATE
:run
the argu ment
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Here my gradle info:
Gradle 1.6
Gradle build time: Dienstag, 7. Mai 2013 09:12 Uhr UTC
Groovy: 1.8.6
Ant: Apache Ant™ version 1.8.4 compiled on May 22 2012
Ivy: 2.2.0
JVM: 1.7.0_04 (Oracle Corporation 23.0-b21)
OS: Windows 7 6.1 amd64
Ah, Windows… the great destroyer of quotes. I’ll dig a little deeper. There are some long standing JDK (ProcessBuilder and friends) bugs in this area that I think are biting here.
Sorry. I should have made this more explicit. I wrote it in the heading, though. 
Yeah, my fault for not picking it up the first time.