Override ClassPath in Bash script to run Java application

I am trying to run a simple Java application in Unix. My Java application read a config file from a directory at run-time. I placed the files in /tmp/paddy/. I created a simple bash script to run a application.

I tried like below and it gives me "no main manifest attribute, in app.jar" error

#!/bin/bash    
java -cp ".:./config/*.*" -jar "app.jar" com.test.MainClass

And tried with below command This time my application is running but couldnt find the aconfig file so it throw me NullPointerException - (since it couldnt load the config file)

#!/bin/bash
java -cp app.jar com.test.MainClass

What is the correct way to override classpath in Java -cp command ? I was searching over the internet, but couldnt get any good answers. I dont have any issues running in windows. Only in linux and I am pretty new to the linux environment.

You have four separate issues here.

-jar and -cp don't work together

If you use the -jar switch, the classpath is taken from the Class-Path manifest entry in the jar's manifest, and that is all that will happen - the -cp switch (and the CLASSPATH environment variable) are completely ignored. The solution is to fix your jarfile, which ought to have that classpath entry.

That's not how bash works.

Separate from that issue, your -cp parameter is broken.

*.* in.. linux...? That's late 90s DOS, mate!

It's java doing the parsing of that *, which is unique, because in linux it's normally bash doing it, but that doesn't work here, because bash will be adding spaces, and java needs colons/semicolons, which is why java does it itself. The point is, java is rather limited and only understands a single *. Which bash will mess up. So, there is really only one way to do this.

• Single quotes.
• One star.

For example:

java -cp '.:./config/*' com.test.MainClass

You don't seem to understand how classpaths work

Each individual entry in a classpath must be either:

• A directory which contains classfiles.
• A jar file

Note how it specifically cannot be 'a directory that contains jar files', and also cannot be 'a class file'; that is not a thing. The * is the usual treatment: It takes every file in the directory you padded with /* and considers them all to be part of the classpath.

So, if you write: java -cp ., that will not include app.jar. If you write java -cp './config/*', that will not include any class or config files hanging off of ./config (only jar files located there).

That's not how config files work

Including config files on the classpath is not how its done. You can, of course. This doesn't do anything whatsoever, unless you are using SomeClass.class.getResource or some other variant of getResource (those are no good, you should be using SomeClass.class.getResource or SomeClass.class.getResourceAsStream, but I digress), in which case, don't do that. Those aren't intended for config files, those are for static files (files that never change, such as, say, a 'save to cloud' icon for your swing user interface application). If you are doing that, you'd need to include ./config (and not './config/*') in your classpath, but it would be a better idea to fix your code.

config files should be in the user's home directory - System.getProperty("user.home"). You should consider the directory that contains the jar file(s) as the place where the executables live, and those are not necessarily editable by the user, and surely the point of a config file is that you can edit them. Hence why using the classpath for these is not how it is done.