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Mar 20

Classpath: *.jar. Finally. Almost

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Ted is talking about annoying nits in Java.

Being able to finally put a wildcard in our Java classpaths is a “thank god. finally” moment.

Then you read on and see that you need to quote the asterisk to prevent the shell from doing its thing:

java -classpath $LIB/’*’ com.xyzzy.app.Main

Ugly, but still it works.

Then you find out that it isn’t recursive, and there is no option to make that happen yet via ‘**’ or something.

It just shows how behind we are. What do the users really need. Give it to them.

Every little change seems so painful. Especially when I can: require dynamically_work_out_file elsewhere.

2 Responses to “Classpath: *.jar. Finally. Almost”

  1. eitan Says:

    yeah, the same can be said of other “new features” in java 6. i recently took a look at the javascript integration. i came to the conclusion that i’d be better off using rhino.

  2. Emmanuel Pirsch Says:

    What about using java -jar myapp.jar and having your manifest Class-Path entry set properly?

    Granted, the * and ** thing can be usefull, but I never really craved for it.

    BTW, the PATH environment variable on all OSes never support recursivity.

    Anyway the * notation should not be required. Just make it so that whenever you specify a path, it will automatically gets all the jars in it. This would make it behave more like the PATH environment variable.

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