Groovy on OS X and MacPorts

Update Note: This is still the case with Groovy 1.6.x and Leopard the same fix still works.

The default MacPorts install of groovy didn't work out of the box. When I ran groovy from the prompt I got a nasty java.lang.SecurityException.

The problem ended up being that my Java CLASSPATH included classes.jar.

The solution ended up clearing out the CLASSPATH system variable altogether before invoking groovy. You can do this with a command line switch but the easiest way to do it was to edit the startGroovy file (found in the /bin directory of the groovy installation). A fast way to find this is using Spotlight

I simply added CLASSPATH= as the first thing in the file:

...
 ##
 ## $Revision: 4298 $
 ## $Date: 2006-12-04 02:39:45 +0100 (Mo, 04 Dez 2006) $
 ##

 CLASSPATH=

 PROGNAME=`basename "$0"`
...

Groovy Process Piping: Follow-up

Thanks to some comments from those a bit more savvy on this topic I'm suggesting the following method from charlesanderson:

p=['sh','-c','ls -l | sort'].execute()
println p.text

This is mostly cross-platform (assuming CygWin) and is nicely succinct.

I like this method over using the Groovy Groosh module as suggested by Yuri Schimke if only because it doesn't require an import:

def f = gsh.find('.', '-name', '*.java', '-ls');
f.pipeTo(lines);

As always there are many ways to skin the same cat.