Corrupt jar file

Question

I have created a jar file in windows 7 using eclipse. When I am trying to open the jar file it says invalid or corrupt jar file. Can anyone suggest me why the jar file is in

Answer 1

This regularly occurs when you change the extension on the JAR for ZIP, extract the zip content and make some modifications on files such as changing the MANIFEST.MF file which is a very common case, many times Eclipse doesn't generate the MANIFEST file as we want, or maybe we would like to modify the CLASS-PATH or the MAIN-CLASS values of it.

The problem occurs when you zip back the folder.

A valid Runnable/Executable JAR has the next structure:

myJAR (Main-Directory)
    |-META-INF (Mandatory)
             |-MANIFEST.MF (Mandatory Main-class: com.MainClass)
    |-com 
         |-MainClass.class (must to implement the main method, mandatory)
    |-properties files (optional)
    |-etc (optional)

If your JAR complies with these rules it will work doesn't matter if you build it manually by using a ZIP tool and then you changed the extension back to .jar

Once you're done try execute it on the command line using:

java -jar myJAR.jar 

When you use a zip tool to unpack, change files and zip again, normally the JAR structure changes to this structure which is incorrect, since another directory level is added on the top of the file system making it a corrupted file as is shown below:

**myJAR (Main-Directory)
    |-myJAR (creates another directory making the file corrupted)**
          |-META-INF (Mandatory)
                   |-MANIFEST.MF (Mandatory Main-class: com.MainClass)
          |-com 
              |-MainClass.class (must to implement the main method, mandatory)
          |-properties files (optional)
          |-etc (optional)

:)