Hi, When I start a long-running process (such as a database system) with spawn=true I would like to know if the process doesn't crash already on the beginning (for instance the database system didn't start at all due to a blocked port etc). Ant script can wait for the process in a separate thread and report a failure. The class org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.Execute could be modified like this: line 524: new Thread(new Runnable() { public void run() { try { process.waitFor(); int returnCode = process.exitValue(); if (Execute.isFailure(returnCode)) { if (failOnError) { throw new BuildException(process + " returned: " + returnCode); } } } catch (Exception e) { throw new RuntimeException(e); } } }).start(); Thank you very much for any oppinion! Tomas Tulka