Actually one way to solve my problem is to use the shell string operators, as follows: This will set a property named current_dir to the last directory of the current absolute path. There is probably a more elegant way to do it, if anyone has suggestions. Aaron ----- Original Message ----- From: Aaron Haspel To: Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2001 5:40 PM Subject: wildcards in replace Is there any way to use wildcard characters in the replace task in addition to some combination of properties and string literals? What I want to do is convert an absolute directory path (say, "/home/aaron", but it could be some path of which I have no advance knowledge) to the last directory in that path ("aaron"), and I'm trying something like this: which fails: "/home/aaron" becomes "home/aaron", nothing is replaced at all. Is there any way in ant to get what I want? Thanks for an informative list, Aaron