I confess I rant about Ant a fair bit, but in truth Ant tasks provide a lot of useful functionality. Even if you don’t use Ant directly, you can still take advantage of the tasks by using, say, Groovy’s AntBuilder.
Ant’s file system tasks, however, have one big disadvantage: they tend to lose or ignore Unix file permissions. This well-documented limitation Continue reading “Preserving File Permissions with Ant Tasks”
The maximum classpath length that Java can handle depends on many factors, including platform and JDK implementation. As far as I can tell, the limit is usually undocumented, but can be as low as a few thousand characters. Additionally, elements beyond Java’s control, such as the shell, can also affect how many characters can safely be used in a classpath.
In practice, this means that the classpath you request can be truncated before the JRE processes it… and you might not find out until you get a very confusing ClassNotFoundException.
Launching with a ludicrously long classpath? Java might miss some of it!
If circumstances dictate an uncomfortably long classpath at launch time, there are a few ways to condense it without resorting to single-character symbolic links.
Continue reading “Java Classpath Length”
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