I thought I would give some feedback, it seems that I made two mistakes... 1) I typed the incorrect version number, so this was why it could not find the explicitly named jar file.
2) even after fixing the jar name this syntax did not work... <taskdef resource="net/sf/antcontrib/antlib.xml"> <classpath> <pathelement location="/lib/ant/ant-contrib-1.0b3.jar"/> </classpath> </taskdef> (yes I did correct the jar name by this point!) but this did work... <taskdef resource="net/sf/antcontrib/antlib.xml"> <classpath> <fileset dir="lib/ant" includes="*.jar"/> </classpath> </taskdef> Does anyone know what was wrong with the first one? Cheers, Rob.