Can an executable .jar file be called without having to use its full path?

Question

I have a .jar file that I would like to be able to call without having to use a full file path to its location.

For example, if the .jar file is located at: /some/path/to/thearchive.jar

I'd like to be able to run it with:

java -jar thearchive.jar

instead of:

java -jar /some/path/to/thearchive.jar

when I'm elsewhere in the directory tree. In my specific case, I'm running a Mac with OS X 10.5.7 installed. Java version "1.5.0_16". I tried adding "/some/path/to" to PATH, JAVA_HOME and CLASSPATH, but that didn't work.

So, how do I setup to run a .jar from the command line without having to use its full path?

UPDATE: Another item to deal with would be arguments. For example:

java -jar /some/path/to/thearchive.jar arg1 arg2

This can have an effect on the way the question is dealt with as mentioned in the answers below.

Answer 1

You can add a variable to hold the directory:

export JARDIR=/some/path/to
java -jar $JARDIR/thearchive.jar

I'm not sure you can do it from environment variables implicitly.

Answer 2

I don't believe so. If you have the jar specified in your CLASSPATH you could just call java with the main class specified. (i.e java com.test.Main) Alternatively you could create an alias in you shell to execute the command

alias execJar="java -jar /some/path/to/thearchive.jar"

Or another alternative is to create a wrapper script to execute it.

Answer 3

No you can't.

Running a jar with -jar does not involve any kind of classpath mechanism since the jar file is the classpath.

Alternatively use a shell alias to launch the jar or a small script file.

Answer 4

According to Sun:

java -jar app.jar

To run the application from jar file that is in other directory, we need to specify the path of that directory as below: java -jar path/app.jar

where path is the directory path at which this app.jar resides.

So either out the path in a "standard" environment variable or define a wrapper which would be in your PATH

Answer 5

The Java system itself does not give you a way to specify something like JAR_PATH (a list of places to look for jar files). The other answers given use the MAC/Unix shell capabilities:

1. Setting an environment variable
2. Setting an alias
3. Possibly using a symbolic link (to the file or to the directory).

What might be helpful is to find out why specifying the entire path is a problem. That may guide us as to which answer is best or possibly find a completely different solution to your problem.