The documentation for the "excludes" parameter is either incorrect or there is an additional "exclude" parameter that means something slightly different on:
http://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/war It complains when I gave it one file with the "excludes" parameter, but when I changed it to "exclude" it worked. Pedantic, yes, but it did cost me all of about 2 minutes and caused me to make the standard WTF face. :) Thanks, John