Creating an Executable JAR for Unix and Linux
Published at 20:46 on 21 March 2022
One of the annoying things about any JVM language is that to run the result of compiling your code, you have to type something like:
java -cp somefile.jar domain.name.name2.SomeClass arg1 arg2 …Or at best:
java -jar somefile.jar arg1 arg2 …
Wouldn’t it be great if you could just type the command name followed by arguments, like you can do with a compiled C or C++ program? The normal way to do this is to write a shell script and make it executable, but this is a tad clunky (now there are two files, the shell script and the JAR that it invokes). It would be nicer to have just a single executable.
Well, you can!
echo "#!/usr/bin/env java -jar" > somename
cat somefile.jar >> somename
chmod +x somenameAnd that is it! You now have an executable binary that is an archive of Java bytecode instead of native machine code. (Of course, it requires a suitable java interpreter to exist on your PATH.)
Best of all, while all of this sounds hackish, it is not just luck that a JAR file with some leading junk tacked on to it is still treated as a valid JAR file. No, this is basically guaranteed to work. You see, JAR files contain their header data at the end, not the beginning, and Java simply ignores all data earlier than what is described in the header.
And since the Macintosh is just a UNIX system under the hood, this trick works for Macs.