IMHO you are being "helped" by the windows command processor. I think it treats whitespace as meaningless. What you would end up with is ...-cacheDir -dt... which the command processor will reduce to ...-cacheDir -dt...
Try typing the command on the command line exactly like it would be presented by Ant and you should see the same results. My suggestion would be to pass the ${my.property} argument as a keyword and value then base the programs behavior on the value of the keyword parameter. This should work in all os. HTH Bill -----Original Message----- From: Martin Senger [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, September 01, 2005 1:37 AM To: Ant Users List Subject: Re: Empty arguments on the command-line under windows Hi, > > If you run ANT in verbose mode (-v) what does it output as the string > that is generated...? > This is how it look underw windows: [testing] Executing 'C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_04\bin\java.exe' with arguments: [testing] '-classpath' [testing] 'C:\Documents and settings\martin\....jar' [testing] 'TestArgs' [testing] '-cacheDir' [testing] '' [testing] '-dt' [testing] [testing] The ' characters around the executable and arguments are [testing] not part of the command. [testing] 0: -cacheDir [testing] 1: -dt And this is how it looks under linux: [testing] Executing '/usr/local/j2sdk1.4.2_08/jre/bin/java' with arguments: [testing] '-classpath' [testing] '/home/senger/....jar' [testing] 'TestArgs' [testing] '-cacheDir' [testing] '' [testing] '-dt' [testing] [testing] The ' characters around the executable and arguments are [testing] not part of the command. [testing] 0: -cacheDir [testing] 1: [testing] 2: -dt And this is the Ant task (I have already posted this in my previous email, sorry for the repetition): <property name="my.property" value=""/> <java classname="TestArgs" taskname="testing" classpathref="build.classpath" fork="true" failonerror="true"> <arg value="-cacheDir"/> <arg value="${my.property}"/> <arg value="-dt"/> </java> So my (sad) conclusion is that I must write my build.xml conditionally for various OS's. That's also what Antoine suggested: > you can, using the condition task, set registry.cache.dir to > "" only when running under windows. > Is this usual with Ant and OS-dependency? This is the first time I am forced to be switching between OS's so I can't say. Many thanks for your help and suggestions. At least I know now how to solve the problem. (But still, I think I am going to look into Ant's sources why it is like it is... ) Cheers, Martin -- Martin Senger email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] skype: martinsenger consulting for: International Rice Research Institute Biometrics and Bioinformatics Unit DAPO BOX 7777, Metro Manila Philippines, phone: +63-2-580-5600 (ext.2324) --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]