What do the square brackets in the description signify when listing tasks using gradle tasks --all?

The title says it all, except to note that the square brackets don’t show up in the description if you don’t use the --all option. Is this some kind of dependency?

Correct, those are the dependent tasks.

Thanks Mark. So the tasks underneath are also dependent tasks, but those are declared with the dependsOn property, while the square brackets are defined some other way? In the groovy class maybe? I’m trying to understand the difference as I’m fairly new to both gradle and groovy.

They are dependencies in the sense that the given task requires the output of another task. For example, if project A has a ‘compile’ dependency on Project B, Project B’s ‘jar’ task will effectively become a dependency of of Project A’s ‘classes’ task, since it needs that artifact.