Changing the current working directory in Java?

Question

How can I change the current working directory from within a Java program? Everything I\'ve been able to find about the issue claims that you simply can\'t do it, but I can\

Answer 1

There is a way to do this using the system property "user.dir". The key part to understand is that getAbsoluteFile() must be called (as shown below) or else relative paths will be resolved against the default "user.dir" value.

import java.io.*;

public class FileUtils
{
    public static boolean setCurrentDirectory(String directory_name)
    {
        boolean result = false;  // Boolean indicating whether directory was set
        File    directory;       // Desired current working directory

        directory = new File(directory_name).getAbsoluteFile();
        if (directory.exists() || directory.mkdirs())
        {
            result = (System.setProperty("user.dir", directory.getAbsolutePath()) != null);
        }

        return result;
    }

    public static PrintWriter openOutputFile(String file_name)
    {
        PrintWriter output = null;  // File to open for writing

        try
        {
            output = new PrintWriter(new File(file_name).getAbsoluteFile());
        }
        catch (Exception exception) {}

        return output;
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception
    {
        FileUtils.openOutputFile("DefaultDirectoryFile.txt");
        FileUtils.setCurrentDirectory("NewCurrentDirectory");
        FileUtils.openOutputFile("CurrentDirectoryFile.txt");
    }
}