Change user.home system property

Question

How do I change the user.home system property from outside my java program, so that it thinks it\'s a different directory from D:\\Documents and Settings\\%USERNAME%? Via en

Answer 1

If you want to set user.home for all Java programs, you can use the special environment variable _JAVA_OPTIONS.

But note that a difficult to suppress warning message will be printed.

$ export _JAVA_OPTIONS=-Duser.home=/some/new/dir
$ java test
Picked up _JAVA_OPTIONS: -Duser.home=/some/new/dir
/some/new/dir

Answer 2

Setting VM argument should work:

java -Duser.home=<new_location> <your_program> 

Here's a test case:

public class test {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    System.out.println(System.getProperty("user.home"));
  }
}

Tested with java 1.5.0_17 on Win XP and Linux

java test
/home/ChssPly76

java -Duser.home=overwritten test
overwritten