Adding jar to classpath when running from command line

Question

Ok I know this question has been asked many many many times before, but I've googled it and looked at examples and looked at questions on SO for the past month, and I seriously cannot get this to work. I think the problem is that I want to be able to run the program from both Eclipse and the command line. I'm also using OSX and I think a lot of the examples I'm reading are for Windows/Linux.

If I have a simple program compiled in Eclipse that I want to run from the command line I do this:

java -cp bin MyProgram

I have another program I compile and run in Eclipse, and this references the MySQL JDBC connector (mysql-connector-java-5.1.19-bin.jar) which is stored in the same directory. This works fine from Eclipse, but I can't run it from the command line.

I've tried all combinations of things...

java -classpath "bin;mysql-connector-java-5.1.19-bin.jar" MyProgram
java -cp bin\;mysql-connector-java-5.1.19-bin.jar MyProgram

and get all sorts of class not found errors...

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: MyProgram
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: MyProgram
    at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:202)
    at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
    at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:190)
    at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:306)
    at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:301)
    at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:247)

Answer 1

Your problem is min separator you are using. Separator ; is for windows. On Unix systems you should use : instead:

java -classpath "bin:mysql-connector-java-5.1.19-bin.jar" MyProgram

Answer 2

Use a ':' to separate your entries on Unix systems:

java -classpath "bin:mysql-connector-java-5.1.19-bin.jar" MyProgram
java -cp bin:mysql-connector-java-5.1.19-bin.jar MyProgram

Eclipse converts it automatically.