Ant needs tools.jar and unable to find it

Question

I am putting together a dev environment for a Java program and after the first try of my Ant build scripts I got this error:

Unable to locate tools.jar. Expected         


        

Answer 1

Even if you have jdk installed, you'll need to redirect JAVA_HOME to point to it.

Here's one weird trick you can put into your .profile to set JAVA HOME properly, no matter which java you have:

export JAVA_HOME=$(dirname $(dirname $(readlink -e /usr/bin/java)))
# Test for jdk installed above jre
if [ -x $JAVA_HOME/../bin/java ]; then export JAVA_HOME=$(dirname $JAVA_HOME); fi