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25
Sep
2008

Configuring Eclipse to use a JDK at a location with spaces in it

I was setting up my Eclipse environment with some new plugins today and ran into some trouble, which seems to have bothered many souls as I gather from the posts I found when trying to fix the problem.

Some tools/plugins/features in Eclipse may need to use a JDK rather than a JRE. Sometimes you may even wish to switch between different versions of the JRE or JDK being used since typically 1.4, 1.5/5 and 1.6/6 are all present on a developers’ system at different locations.

I got a mesage from a Maven plugin which said that it needed a JDK to be used to run Eclipse instead of a JRE that it was currently using. Well, this shouldn’t usually present much of a problem. You can choose the virtual machine used to run Eclipse by passing the -vm argument to eclipse.exe. What’s usually needed is something like “eclipse.exe -vm c:\jdk1.6\bin\javaw.exe”. Mind you, javaw.exe is used when you don’t want an associated console window.

I did have JDK 1.6 installed. But it was installed to “C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_07″. That, it seems, is the default location. The space in the path caused big problems. I tried quotes\no quotes and other magical incantations to get it to accept the argument with a space but to no avail.

So instead of using the command line switch, I put an entry into eclipse.ini which is in the same directory as eclipse.exe. But this didn’t work either.

Finally, what did work was that I started command.exe (the 16 bit DOS shell) and navigated to the JDK directory using “dir /X” for help which shows names generated in the format “C:\PROGRA~1\JAVA\JDK16~1.0_0\BIN”. Perhaps you remember coming across such filenames.

Anyway, the older 8.3 style directory name worked! My final eclipse.ini is posted below.

-showsplash
org.eclipse.platform
–launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256M
-framework
plugins\org.eclipse.osgi_3.4.0.v20080605-1900.jar
-vm
C:\PROGRA~1\JAVA\JDK16~1.0_0\BIN
-vmargs
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5
-Xms40m
-Xmx512m

I was using Windows XP with SP3 and Eclipse 3.4. There is likely to be a better solution that I missed. If you have it or if this post helped you, please leave a coment. :)

Related posts:

  1. Sun JDK 7 released
  2. Debug with Step Filters in Eclipse
  3. Conditional breakpoints in Java development with Eclipse
  4. Eclipse tip: Add a short cut key to Skip All Breakpoints
  5. Identifying a thread with high CPU usage in a Java app


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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 6:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

21 Responses to “Configuring Eclipse to use a JDK at a location with spaces in it”

  1. Bajrang September 27th, 2008 at 7:38 pm

    Thanks a lot… It helped me get rid of the Jdk 1.6 it was always picking…
    I also tried the quotes and everything… and even tried to put the vm arg using a shortcut and passing the command line arg but it did not work… the old is gold style seems to work very well.
    Thanks again mate…
    Cheers

  2. Touba December 29th, 2008 at 3:49 pm

    Thanks for ur useful post.
    goodluck.

  3. Pablo February 19th, 2009 at 7:41 pm

    For me, it works by setting it with spaces into eclipse.ini

  4. Pablo February 19th, 2009 at 7:42 pm

    It’s me again. I’m using eclipse 3.4.0 under Windows XP SP3

  5. James April 8th, 2009 at 7:49 am

    Just 5 seconds before I found your post, I’ve figured it out by replacing ‘\’ with ‘/’:

    -vm
    C:/Program Files/Java/jdk1.6.0_11/bin

    and it worked!

    And your method is also great! Thanks man! :D

  6. Radhika April 23rd, 2009 at 10:34 am

    Ur comment is very useful .Thanks.

  7. Mihai May 14th, 2009 at 8:20 pm

    Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

  8. Anant Shrivastava May 29th, 2009 at 9:08 pm

    just a quick suggestion

    try putting “\ ” instead of ” ” that should help

    what i mean is that escape all spaces with a backslash

    Hope that helps.

  9. Anant Shrivastava May 29th, 2009 at 9:10 pm

    can’t get this bit

    if i put my site in website your wordpress says comment discarded.

    my website is anantshri [dot] info

  10. Onkar Joshi May 30th, 2009 at 10:31 pm

    Err, odd. Might be due to to some WordPress spam filter.

  11. P June 5th, 2009 at 1:59 am

    Thank you for your post! It helps me to solve similar issue you were getting..

  12. Rajeev June 11th, 2009 at 1:30 am

    Mine works fine without any error.
    -vm
    c:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_13\bin

  13. Sigh O'Nara August 21st, 2009 at 12:25 am

    Thank you for this. Very helpful and I no longer get that annoying message.

  14. Anil August 23rd, 2009 at 2:27 pm

    Many thanks. Yes. MVN plugin was the bitch.

  15. Sasha September 20th, 2009 at 4:28 am

    Mine works without any errors as well. I had the same problem, and it ended up being because the -vm option was located below the -vmargs option in the ini file. Once I moved it up, everything worked fine, even with spaces.

  16. Fedor October 22nd, 2009 at 11:53 pm

    Thanks everyone. By combining Onkar’s tip with those of several of the commenters I finally fixed the problem!

  17. Andrew February 11th, 2010 at 2:53 pm

    I was loosing the will to live until I found this post. Thanks a lot!

  18. Gautam October 30th, 2010 at 7:57 am

    Thanks buddy! I had been struggling with this thing for past 1/2 hour!! … eclipse documentation must be updated with this (that -vm needs the path all the way uptil /bin folder! )

    Thanks!
    Gautam

  19. Onkar Joshi November 1st, 2010 at 10:12 pm

    @Gautam :) Pleasure to have been of help.

  20. Peter Skov June 14th, 2011 at 7:09 pm

    THANK YOU! Saved our bacon.

  21. Sridevi September 11th, 2011 at 5:03 am

    Hi,
    I have the same issue and my eclipse is running on jre. But Maven needs JDK to download all the dependencies.
    I am going to try the above suggestions.

    Thanks guys!
    Sridevi

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