“Forked Java VM exited abnormally” error from junit tests

Question

I have a java junit test that passes when run alone on a development machine. We also have a hudson job which runs all the tests, invoked via ant, on a Mac OS X 10.4 node wi

Answer 1

This can occur when an uncaught RuntimeException is thrown. Unfortunately, the junit ant task doesn't output the exception so there isn't an easy way to determine the root cause. You can work around this by running the test case from the command line where the exception will be shown.

java  org.junit.runner.JUnitCore 

In my case, an IllegalArgumentException was being thrown.