Adding to the classpath on OSX

Question

Can anyone tell me how to add to the classpath on OSX?

Answer 1

If you want to make a certain set of JAR files (or .class files) available to every Java application on the machine, then your best bet is to add those files to /Library/Java/Extensions.

Or, if you want to do it for every Java application, but only when your Mac OS X account runs them, then use ~/Library/Java/Extensions instead.

EDIT: If you want to do this only for a particular application, as Thorbjørn asked, then you will need to tell us more about how the application is packaged.

Answer 2

In OSX, you can set the classpath from scratch like this:

export CLASSPATH=/path/to/some.jar:/path/to/some/other.jar

Or you can add to the existing classpath like this:

export CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:/path/to/some.jar:/path/to/some/other.jar

This is answering your exact question, I'm not saying it's the right or wrong thing to do; I'll leave that for others to comment upon.

Answer 3

If you just want to use a class path just for the current run time. You can achieve that by add a class path option when you run java command.

In you command line. Use java -cp "path/to/your/jar:." main rather than just java main

By doing so, your command tells the process class paths where it can search for libraries.

Answer 4

If your shell is tcsh or csh, you can set it in /etc/profile. Open terminal, "vim /etc/profile" and add the following line:

setenv CLASSPATH (insert your classpath here)

Answer 5

Normally there's no need for that. First of all

echo $CLASSPATH

If there's something in there, you probably want to check Applications -> Utilites -> Java.