Differences between classpath and sourcepath options of javac

Question

I read the Sun documentation and a lot of posts on Stack Overflow, but I\'m still confused about the differences between the Java compiler options -cp and

Answer 1

CLASSPATH tells the compiler and the class loader where to look for the .class files it needs.

Sourcepath is something I don't use so much. I believe it's optional, because usually the current directory is the sourcepath. CLASSPATH is not.