What version of javac built my jar?

Question

How can I tell what version of the Java compiler was used to build a jar? I have a jar file, and it could have been built in any one of three JDKs. We need to know exactly

Answer 1

Developers and administrators running Bash may find these convenience functions helpful:

jar_jdk_version() {
  [[ -n "$1" && -x "`command -v javap`" ]] && javap -classpath "$1" -verbose $(jar -tf "$1" | grep '.class' | head -n1 | sed -e 's/\.class$//') | grep 'major version' | sed -e 's/[^0-9]\{1,\}//'
}

print_jar_jdk_version() {
  local version
  version=$(jar_jdk_version "$1")
  case $version in 49) version=1.5;; 50) version=1.6;; 51) version=1.7;; 52) version=1.8;; esac
  [[ -n "$version" ]] && echo "`basename "$1"` contains classes compiled with JDK version $version."
}

You can paste them in for one-time usage or add them to ~/.bash_aliases or ~/.bashrc. The results look something like:

$ jar_jdk_version poi-ooxml-3.5-FINAL.jar
49

and

$ print_jar_jdk_version poi-ooxml-3.5-FINAL.jar
poi-ooxml-3.5-FINAL.jar contains classes compiled with JDK version 1.5.

EDIT As jackrabbit points out, you can't 100% rely on the manifest to tell you anything useful. If it was, then you could pull it out in your favorite UNIX shell with unzip:

$ unzip -pa poi-ooxml-3.5-FINAL.jar META-INF/MANIFEST.MF
Manifest-Version: 1.0
Ant-Version: Apache Ant 1.7.1
Created-By: 11.3-b02 (Sun Microsystems Inc.)
Built-By: yegor
Specification-Title: Apache POI
Specification-Version: 3.5-FINAL-20090928
Specification-Vendor: Apache
Implementation-Title: Apache POI
Implementation-Version: 3.5-FINAL-20090928
Implementation-Vendor: Apache

This .jar doesn't have anything useful in the manifest about the contained classes.