"Picked up JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS: -javaagent:/usr/share/java/jayatanaag.jar" when starting the Scala interpreter

Question

When running the Scala interpreter in Ubuntu 14.04, I get the following message printed as the first line:

Picked up JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS: -javaagent:/usr/share/java/jayatanaag.jar  

Followed by the familiar "Welcome to Scala" message.

I'm worried because I haven't seen that when running Scala before - what does it mean, is it dangerous, etc?

Apparently the environment variable $JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS is set to -javaagent:/usr/share/java/jayatanaag.jar - I didn't set that, but what did and why? Can I safely unset it?

Additional info:

• recently installed Android Studio
• The word "ayatana" in the JAR's name might point to Ubuntu's project Ayatana

Answer 1

You can disable jayatana just for the current shell session by unsetting JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS like so:

unset JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS 

That way it will still be enabled for applications needing it.

Answer 2

This occurs if you have installed jayatana which allows the hidden global menu in eclipse to work with Unity:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:danjaredg/jayatana sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install jayatana 

that puts JARs in the /usr/share/java/ folder which is echoed by the JVM when starting up.

If you remove that software, you will not see the message:

sudo apt-get remove jayatana 

You may have to delete:

/usr/share/upstart/sessions/jayatana.conf  

and restart your session so that the environment variable JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS is not set.