Editing Apache Ant (section)

==Portability==
Ant is intended to work with all systems for which Java runtimes are available. It is most commonly used with [[Microsoft Windows|Windows]], [[Linux]], [[macOS]] and other [[Unix]] operating systems but has also been used on other platforms such as OS/2, OpenVMS, [[Oracle Solaris|Solaris]], HP-UX.<ref>
Apache Ant Manual.
Section
[https://ant.apache.org/manual/install.html#sysrequirements "System Requirements"].
</ref>

Ant was designed to be more portable than Make.{{sfn | Moodie | 2005 | loc = Chapter §1 Introducing Ant| pp=5-9}} Compared to Make, Ant uses less platform-specific [[operating system shell|shell]] commands. Ant provides built-in functionality that is designed to behave the same on all platforms. For example, in the sample <code>build.xml</code> file above, the ''clean'' target deletes the <code>classes</code> directory and everything in it. In a Makefile this would typically be done with the command:
 rm -rf classes/
<code>[[rm (Unix)|rm]]</code> is a [[Unix]]-specific command unavailable in some other environments. [[Microsoft Windows]], for example, would use:
 rmdir /S /Q classes
In an Ant build file the same goal would be accomplished using a built-in command:
<syntaxhighlight lang="xml">
 <delete dir="classes"/>
</syntaxhighlight>

Additionally, Ant does not differentiate between forward slash or backslash for directories and semicolon or colon for path separators. It converts each to the symbol appropriate to the platform on which it executes.