Tinking around with Ant I found out you can reference system environment properties within your build file.

So in Windows for example you can run SET at the command line and get a long list of properties:

U:\>set
ALLUSERSPROFILE=C:\Documents and Settings\All Users
ANT_HOME=D:\ant
APPDATA=C:\Documents and Settings\priestj\Application Data
CLIENTNAME=zappa

You can easily reference these in your build file – first set property environment to “env”:

<target name="echo">
<property environment="env"/>

</target>

Now we’ll add some of our Windows system properties (note these are case sensitive!):

<target name="echo">
<property environment="env"/>
<echo message="env.ALLUSERSPROFILE:   ${env.ALLUSERSPROFILE}" />
<echo message="env.ANT_HOME:   ${env.ANT_HOME}" />
<echo message="env.APPDATA:   ${env.APPDATA}" />
<echo message="env.CLIENTNAME:   ${env.CLIENTNAME}" /> </target>

Running this we can see these properties are picked up by Ant!

Buildfile: D:\build.xml
echo:
[echo] env.ALLUSERSPROFILE:   C:\Documents and Settings\All Users
[echo] env.ANT_HOME:   C:\eclipse\plugins\org.apache.ant_1.7.0.v200803061910
[echo] env.APPDATA:   C:\Documents and Settings\priestj\Application Data
[echo] env.CLIENTNAME:   zappa

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The Using Environment Properties In Ant by Jim, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.