Changing the current working directory in Java?

How can I change the current working directory from within a Java program? Everything I've been able to find about the issue claims that you simply can't do it, but I can't believe that that's really the case.

I have a piece of code that opens a file using a hard-coded relative file path from the directory it's normally started in, and I just want to be able to use that code from within a different Java program without having to start it from within a particular directory. It seems like you should just be able to call System.setProperty( "user.dir", "/path/to/dir" ), but as far as I can figure out, calling that line just silently fails and does nothing.

I would understand if Java didn't allow you to do this, if it weren't for the fact that it allows you to get the current working directory, and even allows you to open files using relative file paths....

There is no reliable way to do this in pure Java. Setting the user.dir property via System.setProperty() or java -Duser.dir=... does seem to affect subsequent creations of Files, but not e.g. FileOutputStreams.

The File(String parent, String child) constructor can help if you build up your directory path separately from your file path, allowing easier swapping.

An alternative is to set up a script to run Java from a different directory, or use JNI native code as suggested below.

The relevant Sun bug was closed in 2008 as "will not fix".

If you run your legacy program with ProcessBuilder, you will be able to specify its working directory.

There is a way to do this using the system property "user.dir". The key part to understand is that getAbsoluteFile() must be called (as shown below) or else relative paths will be resolved against the default "user.dir" value.

import java.io.*;

public class FileUtils
{
    public static boolean setCurrentDirectory(String directory_name)
    {
        boolean result = false;  // Boolean indicating whether directory was set
        File    directory;       // Desired current working directory

        directory = new File(directory_name).getAbsoluteFile();
        if (directory.exists() || directory.mkdirs())
        {
            result = (System.setProperty("user.dir", directory.getAbsolutePath()) != null);
        }

        return result;
    }

    public static PrintWriter openOutputFile(String file_name)
    {
        PrintWriter output = null;  // File to open for writing

        try
        {
            output = new PrintWriter(new File(file_name).getAbsoluteFile());
        }
        catch (Exception exception) {}

        return output;
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception
    {
        FileUtils.openOutputFile("DefaultDirectoryFile.txt");
        FileUtils.setCurrentDirectory("NewCurrentDirectory");
        FileUtils.openOutputFile("CurrentDirectoryFile.txt");
    }
}

It is possible to change the PWD, using JNA/JNI to make calls to libc. The JRuby guys have a handy java library for making POSIX calls called jnr-posix. Here's the maven info

As mentioned you can't change the CWD of the JVM but if you were to launch another process using Runtime.exec() you can use the overloaded method that lets you specify the working directory. This is not really for running your Java program in another directory but for many cases when one needs to launch another program like a Perl script for example, you can specify the working directory of that script while leaving the working dir of the JVM unchanged.

See Runtime.exec javadocs

Specifically,

public Process exec(String[] cmdarray,String[] envp, File dir) throws IOException

where dir is the working directory to run the subprocess in