My bad, I said above that ant was exe, but it is in fact, .bat, or .cmd. However the search order in windows is PATHEXT=.COM;.EXE;.BAT;.CMD...

I tried providing the full path to ant.bat and am seeing the same type of results. The cmd version apparently has bugs and won't run at all.

I checked out the ant.bat file and it appears to be setting the err variable in the file in the event of an error. In any event, when executing it directly from the command prompt it does leave %ERRORLEVEL% set to 1. Not sure if that is what system() consults or not?

Hi,

ERRORLEVEL merely reflects errno, and that can change each time you execute a command

I think the problem is the /b in  exit /b %ANT_ERROR%

here is why

$ perl -le" print system 'errorexit1.bat' "

$ exit 1
256

$ perl -le" print system 'errorexitb1.bat' "

$ exit /b 1
0

$
[download]

This tells me you are probably supposed to system antRun.bat or https://github.com/apache/ant/blob/master/src/script/antRun.pl

I didn't get the same results. I'm running Windows 8 with 64bit Perl. What are you using?

C:\Users\Lotus1>perl -v
This is perl 5, version 22, subversion 1 (v5.22.1) built for MSWin32-x
+64-multi-thread
[...]

C:\Users\Lotus1>perl -e" print system 'test1.bat' " 

C:\Users\Lotus1>exit 1 
256
C:\Users\Lotus1>perl -e" print system 'test1b.bat' " 

C:\Users\Lotus1>exit /b 1 
256
[download]