How is the Java classpath set on a Mac?

Question

How is the Java classpath set on a Mac?

Answer 1

Since you tagged the question with tomcat, I'll assume that you're running a Java Servlet webapp.

In that case, the classpath covers the JAR files in /WEB-INF/lib folder of the webapp and all class files in /WEB-INF/classes folder of the webapp. So you've to drop the 3rd party JAR files and/or your classes exactly there to get them to be visible in the runtime classpath of the webapp.

The %CLASSPATH% environment variable is by the way ignored by everything else than the java executabele which is executed without -jar, -cp and -classpath arguments. Don't use it for webapps.