WriteLinesToFile Task

Note

This article applies to Visual Studio 2015. If you're looking for the latest Visual Studio documentation, see Visual Studio documentation. We recommend upgrading to the latest version of Visual Studio. Download it here

Writes the paths of the specified items to the specified text file.

Task Parameters

The following table describes the parameters of the WriteLinestoFile task.

Parameter	Description
File	Required ITaskItem parameter. Specifies the file to write the items to.
Lines	Optional ITaskItem[] parameter. Specifies the items to write to the file.
Overwrite	Optional Boolean parameter. If true, the task overwrites any existing content in the file.
Encoding	Optional String parameter. Selects the character encoding, for example, "Unicode". See also Encoding.

Remarks

If Overwrite is true, creates a new file, write the contents to the file, and then closes the file. If the target file already exists, it is overwritten. If Overwrite is false, appends the contents to file, creating the target file if it does not already exist.

In addition to the parameters listed above, this task inherits parameters from the TaskExtension class, which itself inherits from the Task class. For a list of these additional parameters and their descriptions, see TaskExtension Base Class.

Example

The following example uses the WriteLinesToFile task to write the paths of the items in the MyItems item collection to the file specified by the MyTextFile item collection.

<Project xmlns="https://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">  
  
    <ItemGroup>  
        <MyTextFile Include="Items.txt"/>  
        <MyItems Include="*.cs"/>  
    </ItemGroup>  
  
    <Target Name="WriteToFile">  
        <WriteLinesToFile  
            File="@(MyTextFile)"  
            Lines="@(MyItems)"  
            Overwrite="true"  
            Encoding="Unicode"/>  
    </Target>  
  
</Project>  

See Also

Tasks
Task Reference