Apache Ant version 1.5.4 compiled on August 12 2003 Red Hat Linux, J2SE 1.4 Consider following build.properties file: base.path=/usr/local base.file=${base.path}/abc.txt and build.xml: <project name="Test" default="dflt"> <property file="build.properties"/> <property name="xyz" value="${base.file}"/> <target name="dflt"> <echo message="test message: ${xyz}"/> </target> </project> ${xyz} is printed correctly as /usr/local//abc.txt Now remove <property file="build.properties"/> from buil.xml and run: ant -propertyfile build.properties ${xyz} is now printed as ${base.path}/abc.txt
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 23404 ***