Ant: c: om/common/endorsed not found

Here is a really funky problem I ran into trying to install a Tomcat application on Tomcat. When I ran the ant script to compile the application, I received the following error message:

c: om/common/endorsed not found

What the *#@!? I asked myself. Well, it turns out you shouldn't put any backslashes in a build.properties file. I had the following:

catalina.home=c:\tom

Well the \t is converted into a tab giving you c: om as the path name. Oh the joys of configuration files!!! Use the following and you are fine:

catalina.home=c:/tom

It is annoying that I have to fill out a configuration file and more annoying that I have to care about which way the stupid slash leans. Grrr!