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What the classpath means how searches work

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The purpose of the classpath is to tell a JVM where to find classes and other resources. The meaning of the classpath and the search process are intertwined.

The classpath is a form of search path which specifies a sequence of locations to look for resources. In a standard classpath, these places are either, a directory in the host file system, a JAR file or a ZIP file. In each cases, the location is the root of a namespace that will be searched.

The standard procedure for searching for a class on the classpath is as follows:

  1. Map the class name to a relative classfile pathname RP. The mapping for class names to class filenames is described elsewhere.
  2. For each entry E in the classpath: 
- Resolve `RP` relative to `E` to give an absolute pathname `AP`.
- Test if `AP` is a path for an existing file.
- If yes, load the class from that file
- Lookup `RP` in the JAR / ZIP file index.
- If the corresponding JAR / ZIP file entry exists, load the class from that entry.

The procedure for searching for a resource on the classpath depends on whether the resource path is absolute or relative. For an absolute resource path, the procedure is as above. For a relative resource path resolved using Class.getResource or Class.getResourceAsStream, the path for the classes package is prepended prior to searching.

(Note these are the procedures implemented by the standard Java classloaders. A custom classloader might perform the search differently.)

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The Classpath:
* The Classpath
* Different ways to specify the classpath
* Adding all JARs in a directory to the classpath
* Load a resource from the classpath
* Classpath path syntax
* Dynamic Classpath
* What the classpath means how searches work
* The bootstrap classpath
* Mapping classnames to pathnames
Table Of Contents
0 Inheritance
1 Getting started with Java
2 Streams
3 Exceptions
4 Collections
5 Lambda Expressions
6 Generics
7 File I/O
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11 Strings
12 InputStreams and OutputStreams
13 Default Methods
14 Classes and Objects
15 Basic Control structures
16 Concurrent Programming Threads
17 Console I/O
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20 Regular Expressions
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22 Documenting Java Code
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25 JAXB
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27 Networking
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30 HttpURLConnection
31 Annotations
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34 Calendar and its Subclasses
35 Nashorn JavaScript engine
36 Java Native Interface (JNI)
37 Remote Method Invocation (RMI)
38 Iterator and Iterable
39 Operators
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42 Properties Class
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44 Reflection API
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56 Encapsulation
57 Type Conversion
58 BigInteger
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60 RSA Encryption
61 Varargs Variable Arguments
62 ThreadLocal
63 Logging
64 static keyword
65 Disassembling and Decompling
66 Resources on classpath
67 log4j, log4j2
68 JVM Flags
69 Oracle Official Code Standard
70 Character encoding
71 Java Memory Management
72 Immutable Objects
73 Object Cloning
74 Alternative Collections
75 Lists
76 BufferedWriter
77 LocalTime
78 Sets
79 Comparable and Comparator
80 JVM Tool Interface
81 Nested and Inner Classes
82 Apache Commons Lang
83 Getters and Setter
84 The Classpath
85 Bytecode Modification
86 XML Parsing using JAXP
87 Reference Types
88 Localization and Internationalization
89 JAX-WS
90 XML XPath Evaluation
91 Performance Tuning
92 Parallel programming with ForkJoin framework
93 Common Pitfalls
94 Non-Access Modifiers
95 Java Compiler
96 XJC
97 Installing Java Standard Edition
98 Process
99 Command line argument processing
100 Dates and Time using java.time
101 Fluent Interface
102 XOM - XML Object Model
103 Just in Time JIT compiler
104 FTP File Transfer Protocol
105 Java Native Access JNI
106 Modules
107 Pitfalls - exceptions
108 Pitfalls - language syntax
109 ServiceLoader
110 ClasssLoader
111 Object References
112 Pitfalss - performance
113 Creating Images Programmatically
114 Applets
115 NIO Networking
116 New File I/O
117 Secure objects
118 Pitfalls - threads and concurrency
119 Splitting a string into fixed length parts
120 Pitfalls - nulls and NullPointerException
121 SecurityManager
122 JNDI
123 super keyword
124 java.util.Objects class
125 Java command: java and javaw
126 Atomic types
127 Floating Point Operations
128 Converting to and from strings
129 sun.misc.Unsafe
130 Java Memory Model
131 Java deployment
132 Java plugin system implementations
133 Queues and deques
134 Runtime commands
135 NumberFormat
136 Security and Cryptograhy
137 Java Virtual Machine JVM
138 Unit Testing
139 JavaBean
140 Expressions
141 Literals
142 Java SE 8 Features
143 Java SE 7 Features
144 Packages
145 Concurrency and Money
146 Concurrent Collections
147 Using ThreadPoolExecutor in multi-threaded applications
148 Java Editions, versions, releases and distributions
149 Dynamic method dispatch
150 JMX
151 Security and cryptography
152 Generating Java Code
153 JShell
154 Benchmarks
155 Collection Factory Methods
156 Multi-release JAR files
157 Stack-Walking API
158 TreeMap and TreeSet
159 Sockets
160 Java Sockets
161 Using other scripting languages in Java
162 Functional interfaces
163 List vs. set
164 2D graphics
165 Reflection
166 Deque interface
167 Enum Map
168 EnumSet class
169 Local Inner class
170 Java Print Service
171 Immutable class
172 String Tokenizer
173 File upload to S3 / AWS
174 Readers and writers
175 Hashtable
176 Enum starting with a number
177 SortedMap
178 WeakHashMap
179 LinkedHashMap
180 StringBuffer
181 Choosing Collections
182 C++ Comparison
183 CompletableFuture
184 Contributors