Ant <war> & <jar> tasks and WinZIP

Yesterday I ran into some freaky behavior while building a web-application for Tomcat using Ant. In my build script I use the war task.
I used WinZIP to check if all files I needed were present in the war file.
When I deployed the war file I created on Tomcat, I got an error indicating that the web.xml file could not be located. In the war file it was present however. Closer inspection revealed that it was located in a directory web-inf (lower-case) in the war file, whilst on the filesystem the directory from which it was build is in uppercase as it should be.

I turned out that opening the war file with WinZIP is the culprit.

Form the ant FAQ on the apache site

You may have seen these lower-case directory names in WinZIP, but WinZIP is trying to be helpful (and fails). If WinZIP encounters a filename that is all upper-case, it assumes it has come from an old DOS box and changes the case to all lower-case for you.

With WinZIP (version 8.1 at least), this can be corrected in the configuration. In the Options/Configuration menu, in the View tab, General section, check the “Allow all upper case files names” box. The META-INF and WEB-INF will look correct.

Easily done …

Tomcat happy, me happy