Archive for January, 2003

I was told that a good thing to do is to create a .sh and .csh file in /etc/profile.d. The .sh file should have these two lines in them:

    export JDK_HOME=<path to your jdk implementation — mine is /usr/java/j2sdk1.4.1_01>
    export PATH=$PATH:$JDK_HOME/bin

My guess at what the .csh file should look like is this:

    setenv JDK_HOME=<path to your jdk implementation — mine is /usr/java/j2sdk1.4.1_01>
    setenv PATH=$PATH:$JDK_HOME/bin

This sets the path variables for all users on the system with .sh and .csh shells, and it creates the JDK_HOME variable which some programs need to function.

This happened to me in Red Hat 8.0 with Sun’s j2sdk1.4.1_01, though I think it happens with a lot of Java packages. My problem was that I was writing at the command line:

 bash> java my_program.class

I should not have included the .class in my command line call. I just had to make sure that I was calling java from the directory where my class file was stored.

Summary: Herein the author lays out the original purpose for this blog.

I realize that a question I have is dumb when I spend a long time finding the solution, and it turns out to be obvious. The problem with obvious answers is that people rarely bother writing them down. Sometimes I forget an obvious answer and end up searching for it twice. No more! I’m going to record obvious answers here so that not only can I find them again, but you can too.

Beware, I am not an expert in anything listed on these pages, and the answers may be wrong. If you find a glaring error, please email me.

These pages were written in haste and are not proofread. Remember that.