Platform Issues

Unix

You should use a GNU version of tar to untar the ant source tree, if you have downloaded this as a tar file.
Ant does not preserve file permissions when a file is copied, moved or archived. Use <chmod> to set permissions, and when creating a tar archive, use the mode attribute of <tarfileset> to set the permissions in the tar file.
Ant is not symbolic link aware in moves, deletes and when recursing down a tree of directories to build up a list of files. Unexpected things can happen.

Microsoft Windows

Windows 9x (win95, win98, win98SE and winME) has a batch file system which does not work fully with long file names, so we recommend that ant and the JDK are installed into directories without spaces, and with 8.3 filenames. The Perl and Python launcher scripts do not suffer from this limitation.

All versions of windows are usually case insensitive, although mounted file systems (Unix drives, Clearcase views) can be case sensitive underneath, confusing patternsets.

Ant can often not delete a directory which is open in an Explorer window. There is nothing we can do about this short of spawning a program to kill the shell before deleting directories.

Apple MacOS X

MacOS X is the first of the Apple platforms that Ant supports completely; it is treated like any other Unix.

Novell Netware

Other platforms

Support for other platforms is not guaranteed to be complete, as certain techniques to hide platform details from build files need to be written and tested on every particular platform. Contributions in this area are welcome.