How to pass Properties to jar from Powershell?

Question

I\'ve been using Powershell-1.0 for command line needs for a while, instead of cmd.exe. Unfortunately, there are still some caveats when using Java. I need to pass a propert

Answer 1

Try launching instead using the following pattern:

java -Duser.language=en -jar any.jar

That assumes that user.language is meant as a system property. If you meant it as a command line argument, change that to:

java -jar any.jar -Duser.language=en

I am actually surprised that the command line you mentioned works at all outside of powershell (though I have confirmed that it works fine for me too, even on Linux) and it is also a little strange that things would work differently inside and outside of powershell.

From java -help:

Usage: java [-options] class [args...]                 
           (to execute a class)                        
   or  java [-options] -jar jarfile [args...]          
           (to execute a jar file)                     
where options include:
...
    -D=
                  set a system property
...

So basically you should always put the JAR filename directly after the -jar command line option, and any JVM options (such as setting system properties with -D) before.