The following variables are available to shell scripts
BUILD_NUMBER
The current build number, such as "153"
BUILD_ID
The current build id, such as "2005-08-22_23-59-59" (YYYY-MM-DD_hh-mm-ss)
JOB_NAME
Name of the project of this build, such as "foo"
BUILD_TAG
String of "hudson-${JOBNAME}-${BUILD_NUMBER}". Convenient to put into a resource file, a jar file, etc for easier identification.
EXECUTOR_NUMBER
The unique number that identifies the current executor (among executors of the same machine) that's carrying out this build. This is the number you see in the "build executor status", except that the number starts from 0, not 1.
JAVA_HOME
If your job is configured to use a specific JDK, this variable is set to the JAVA_HOME of the specified JDK. When this variable is set, PATH is also updated to have $JAVA_HOME/bin.
WORKSPACE
The absolute path of the workspace.
HUDSON_URL
Full URL of Hudson, like http://server:port/hudson/
SVN_REVISION
For Subversion-based projects, this variable contains the revision number of the module.
CVS_BRANCH
For CVS-based projects, this variable contains the branch of the module. If CVS is configured to check out the trunk, this environment variable will not be set.

To understand how environmental variables provided by Hudson can be utilized by Ant, study the following target:

<target name="printinfo">
  <property environment="env" />
  <echo message="${env.BUILD_TAG}"/>
</target>