I ran into the same problem countless times, so I wrote a little tool to find them.
A simple command line:
findclass MyClass -classpath ...
It searches directories, jar, zip, war and ear files for your class.
I wrote it a few years back and use it all the time.
I thought others might find it useful too so I uploaded onto github.
It's freely available to download:
https://github.com/eurozulu/Findclass/tree/master/dist
If you want to look at the source, it's in the same site:
https://github.com/eurozulu/Findclass/tree/master
If you like it, just let me know to give me that warm comfy feeling :)
