If an ant build passes through a parameter referencing a "build parameter", the replacement will not occur if the build parameter is an empty string.

e.g. if properties on Ant build step are:

myprop=$buildVariable

The resulting ant command line will look like:

ant -Dmyprop=$buildVariable

instead of

ant -Dmyprop=

The reason is that the EnvVars jenkins class, will remove properties when they are empty. This odd behaviour is also discussed in JENKINS-15146 ... it would seem that empty string is valid and only null should be removed.

This issue is particularly tricky as things will mostly work as expected on Unix operating systems because the $buildVariable will be replaced by the shell with the build variable in the environment. If fails completely on Windows because no variable expansion occurs.

Also note that the same behaviour is not seen by the gradle plugin, as does these replacements slightly differently (replacing build parameters without putting them into EnvVars).

I'm preparing a pull request to resolve this.