Making and Creating a self-contained Jar file using command prompt

Question

My simple "hello, world" program has the following file structure:

root TestClass.class manifest.txt

This is the source contained in TestClass.java:

 package root;

    public class TestClass {

        public static void main(String[] args) {
            System.out.println("Executable jar worked!");
        }

    }

manifest.txt contains this (it does end with a line feed):

Main-Class: TestClass

In cmd.exe (windows 7, if relevant), I created a .jar with the following command:

jar cvfm TestClass.jar manifest.txt TestClass.class

which produced the following:

    added manifest
adding: TestClass.class(in = 439) (out= 303)(deflated 30%)

The problem occurs when I try to excute this new jar file. I first tried simply entering TestClass.jar and this gives absolutely no output - equivalent to just pressing enter..

Next, I tried this:

java -jar TestClass.jar

which gave me:

Error: Could not find or load main class TestClass

So my question is this: How do I produce and run a jar file solely in command prompt, such that the output can be seen here in cmd?

I want it to be self-contained and executable in the same way that ,say, chrome.exe is. Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

you have to specify a fully qualified class name in manifest file

In your case you have to specify package name root, so your manifest.txt should contain as follows

Main-Class: root.TestClass

Note: You have to put your TestClass.class file in a directory named root(i.e., package name should match with directory name)

root/TestClass.class

use this command to create jar file

jar cvfm Test.jar manifest.txt root/TestClass.class