Including all the jars in a directory within the Java classpath

Question

Is there a way to include all the jar files within a directory in the classpath?

I\'m trying java -classpath lib/*.jar:. my.package.Program and it is no

Answer 1

To whom it may concern,

I found this strange behaviour on Windows under an MSYS/MinGW shell.

Works:

$ javac -cp '.;c:\Programs\COMSOL44\plugins\*' Reclaim.java

Doesn't work:

$ javac -cp 'c:\Programs\COMSOL44\plugins\*' Reclaim.java
javac: invalid flag: c:\Programs\COMSOL44\plugins\com.comsol.aco_1.0.0.jar
Usage: javac  
use -help for a list of possible options

I am quite sure that the wildcard is not expanded by the shell, because e.g.

$ echo './*'
./*

(Tried it with another program too, rather than the built-in echo, with the same result.)

I believe that it's javac which is trying to expand it, and it behaves differently whether there is a semicolon in the argument or not. First, it may be trying to expand all arguments that look like paths. And only then it would parse them, with -cp taking only the following token. (Note that com.comsol.aco_1.0.0.jar is the second JAR in that directory.) That's all a guess.

This is

$ javac -version
javac 1.7.0