Apache Ant environment variables problems (Win XP)

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jg.campbell.ng@gmail.com - 22 Aug 2005 18:30 GMT

I have Apache Ant working properly here on my home machine -- Windows
XP.

However in a university laboratory (networked) I have problems.
Possibly they are more related to Windows and associated than to Ant,
but maybe someone can see the problem.

We have set environment variables as follows:

- ANT_HOME is set to the name of the directory Ant is in, i.e. one
above the \bin;

- JAVA_HOME is likewise set to ... JDK;

- PATH has Ant's \bin in it;

- PATH has JDK's \bin in it;

These echo okay. java and javac work fine.

When we attempt to execute Ant, we get:

"ANT_HOME is set incorrectly or ant could not be located. Please set
ANT_HOME."

Possible source: there may be problems with /an/ ANT_HOME env. variable
coming from registry; i.e. the sys. admin. had ANT_HOME pointing to
Ant's \bin. But I got him to change that.

But unlikely, since before either of PATH or ANT_HOME had been set by
the sys. admin. I had managed to get Admin. privileges and set them
myself -- correctly I thought, at least similar to my working home
system.

Any ideas? I'm hardly the first to get such a message; as for the
phrase "... ant could not be located" -- what software /other than ant/
would issue such a message?

Incidentally, I'm a Linux user -- which explains all the command line
stuff.

TIA,

Jon C.

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Daniel Dyer - 23 Aug 2005 09:36 GMT

> When we attempt to execute Ant, we get:
>
[quoted text clipped - 9 lines]
> myself -- correctly I thought, at least similar to my working home
> system.

Is it possible that spaces in the path are causing problems? If there are
any spaces it might be worth changing the path to use the old 8.3 style
file names (e.g. C:\Progra~1\whatever instead of C:\Program
Files\whatever), or use quotes, or move the software to a path that
doesn't have spaces.

Dan.

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Daniel Dyer
http://www.dandyer.co.uk

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jg.campbell.ng@gmail.com - 23 Aug 2005 14:21 GMT

> > When we attempt to execute Ant, we get:
> >
[quoted text clipped - 15 lines]
> Files\whatever), or use quotes, or move the software to a path that
> doesn't have spaces.

Nope, oddly enough, no spaces in paths -- for both JDK and Ant. On my
home machine at some stage, I did have Ant complaining about not being
able to understand JAVA_HOME (I think), which at that time was in
"Program Files".

I should have mentioned that fact.

Hmmm... 8.3? The only difference I can detect is that on my working
system, ANT_HOME is c:\apache-ant-1.6.5, whilst on the problem system
it is c:\Ant\apache-ant-1.6.5.

On a university networked system, maybe God only knows how meny
versions of system variables there are?

It's only first year stuff, but NB /not/ introdutory programming, so I
suppose I could flatten the directory structure and do without ant; but
the textbook uses ant; and it will be nice for them to get to know that
ant exists.

Many thanks,

Jon C.

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Daniel Dyer - 23 Aug 2005 17:36 GMT

>> Is it possible that spaces in the path are causing problems? If there
>> are
[quoted text clipped - 7 lines]
> able to understand JAVA_HOME (I think), which at that time was in
> "Program Files".

I checked my path after posting that and realised that I do have spaces,
so that was unlikely to have been the problem.

What does "echo %ANT_HOME%" display?

> I should have mentioned that fact.
>
> Hmmm... 8.3? The only difference I can detect is that on my working
> system, ANT_HOME is c:\apache-ant-1.6.5, whilst on the problem system
> it is c:\Ant\apache-ant-1.6.5.

8.3 refers to the MS-DOS naming convention, where a file name could have
up to 8 characters before the dot and up to three afterwards (with no
spaces).

Dan.

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Daniel Dyer
http://www.dandyer.co.uk

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Roedy Green - 30 Aug 2005 01:04 GMT

>> But unlikely, since before either of PATH or ANT_HOME had been set by
>> the sys. admin. I had managed to get Admin. privileges and set them
>> myself -- correctly I thought, at least similar to my working home
>> system.

You can put your sets in a bat file you call prior to invoking ant.
Only once you have got them all perfect, hand them over to your admin
for burning into the registry.

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Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
http://mindprod.com Again taking new Java programming contracts.

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jg.campbell.ng@gmail.com - 25 Aug 2005 15:38 GMT

[...]

> When we attempt to execute Ant, we get:
>
> "ANT_HOME is set incorrectly or ant could not be located. Please set
> ANT_HOME."

Solved. ANT_HOME\lib contained no ant.jar file; in fact, I think
ANT_HOME\lib was empty.

If one looks at the batch file ANT_HOME\bin\ant.bat, one finds that it
is the absence of ANT_HOME\lib\ant.jar that causes the batch file to
emit the error message above. I knew that knowledge of batch file
programming would come in useful some time :-)

Dunno how the installation (ant-1.6.4) missed that out, but anyway the
problem is solved.

I must remember to switch my brain on the next time we have a problem
like that.

Best regards,

Jon C.

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Apache Ant environment variables problems (Win XP)

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