Finding the JRE on Windows

Question

I know this question is going to sound very stupid but here goes nonetheless. I need to bundle the new version of the JRE with my applicaiton and I cannot find either a version of the JRE that is not in .exe nor can I find where the jre is installed to on Windows 7 (windows 7 search cannot find anything so it is not helpful). Can anyone tell me where I can download a version of the JRE the would be good to bundle or where I can find the path that windows installed the JRE too?

Answer 1

corsiKa is correct about Windows 7 I found that the file path for jre is C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre7

For my purposes I needed to install the Connector/J JDBC driver in the ext directory. jre7\lib\ext\

Answer 2

I have found another, more generic solution that I'm using in Powershell. The problem is that Java is now using symlinks to java, javaw and javac, so you can't always rely on using "where.exe java" because it returns the symlink.

I now rely on Java to report where it's actually running from by using verbose mode and parsing the output.

$javapath=((java -verbose -version | ? {$_ -match "Opened" }).replace("[Opened ","")).replace("\lib\rt.jar]","")

It will find the path that java reports it's actually using and return the installation directory. The only problem I haven't quite resolved is that it outputs extra information because of the "-version" option, but the only other option is the help, which is worse. However, when run from a script, the console output can simply be ignored. If someone else has a way of keeping it quiet, I'd like to hear it.