How to use a wildcard in the classpath to add multiple jars? [duplicate]

From: http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/tools/windows/classpath.html

Class path entries can contain the basename wildcard character *, which is considered equivalent to specifying a list of all the files in the directory with the extension .jar or .JAR. For example, the class path entry foo/* specifies all JAR files in the directory named foo. A classpath entry consisting simply of * expands to a list of all the jar files in the current directory.

This should work in Java6, not sure about Java5

(If it seems it does not work as expected, try putting quotes. eg: "foo/*")

This works on Windows:

java -cp "lib/*" %MAINCLASS%

where %MAINCLASS% of course is the class containing your main method.

Alternatively:

java -cp "lib/*" -jar %MAINJAR%

where %MAINJAR% is the jar file to launch via its internal manifest.

Basename wild cards were introduced in Java 6; i.e. "foo/*" means all ".jar" files in the "foo" directory.

In earlier versions of Java that do not support wildcard classpaths, I have resorted to using a shell wrapper script to assemble a Classpath by 'globbing' a pattern and mangling the results to insert ':' characters at the appropriate points. This would be hard to do in a BAT file ...