java -cp does not work?

Was trying to get Sahi's batch and shell scripts to work properly since I get a lot of queries regarding database drivers not being found instpite of adding to the classpath.

The problem is this. I need to add a mysql driver to Sahi's classpath so that the scripts can access the driver to do some data driven testing.

So I had to add the mysql driver to this:

java -jar ../lib/sahi.jar

Trivially, I added a -cp option so the command looks like this:

java -cp ../extlib/mysql-connector-java-5.0.4-bin.jar -jar ../lib/sahi.jar

But this does NOT work. Why? Because an executable jar should have its classpath in its manifest file and not outside.

The way to solve this is to use:

java -cp ../extlib/mysql-connector-java-5.0.4-bin.jar;../lib/sahi.jar net.sf.sahi.Proxy

So I made these changes on my windows machine, and it worked. Then logged on to my newly installed ubuntu to check if the shell script works with the same changes.

Made the necessary semi-colon to colon conversion in the classpath, so it looks like this.

java -cp ../extlib/mysql-connector-java-5.0.4-bin.jar:../lib/sahi.jar net.sf.sahi.Proxy

The sahi.sh file has a few other lines too.

When I ran sahi.sh, it gave me a NoClassDefFound error for net/sf/sahi/Proxy! After hunting around quite a bit on the net to see if there was such a problem on linux, I realized that nobody on the forums seems to understand the problem even when somebody reported it.

Eventually I realized that since I had edited the file in windows, it was adding ^M characters at the newlines which was not being recognized by the shell. So I used another editor and got rid of them by deleting and reentering the newlines. (I could also have used dos2unix, but did not have it installed on my machine)

I also realized why the people in the forums did not understand the problem. Most of the replies were from people using linux all the time and the question posters would have mostly been using windows but since the problem was on a linux machine would have posted the question on linux forums!

Anyway, now things work properly :)