How to find which jars and in what order are loaded by a classloader?

Question

I could not find a clear answer to this question elsewhere, so I\'ll try here:

Is there some way (programmatic or other) to get a list of JARs/classes loaded by an A

Answer 1

The short answer is no. Classloaders are not required to expose their search logic.

However, if your classloader instance happens to be URLClassLoader or a subclass, then you do have access to the list of jars/directories, via the getURLs() method. Per the doc for this class, those URLs will be searched in order.

In practice, if you're trying to find out where a class is being loaded from, Steve's answer is probably more useful.