Get pom.xml version with xmllint

Question

I have a pom.xml as such

Answer 1

Since your XML is using namespaces, there's no real nice way to do it. For a direct xpath query, if it's safe to ignore the namespace, you could do something like this:

$ xmllint --xpath '/*[local-name()="project"]/*[local-name()="version"]/text()' pom.xml

If you wanted to do it the "right" way, you'll need to start a shell to setup the namespaces and output the desired value. Unfortunately, you'll have to clean out the prompts in the output.

$ xmllint --shell pom.xml <<< 'setns ns=http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0
cat /ns:project/ns:version/text()'