Issue with spaces in Java command line options

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,

I am writing a shell script to build Java options dynamically in a variable array and pass them to java.exe. If an option value contains a space, I cannot find a way to get it interpreted correctly. Here is my example:

#!/bin/bash
JAVA_HOME=/opt/jvm/jre1.5.0_18
JAVA_OPTS=("-Xms256m -Xmx256m")
JAVA_OPTS=("${JAVA_OPTS[@]}" "-Dthis.is.a.test=\"A B C\"");
# ... and so on ...
echo ${JAVA_OPTS[@]}
$JAVA_HOME/bin/java ${JAVA_OPTS[@]} some.java.class

Although JAVA_OPTS echoes correctly as

-Xms512m -Xmx512m -Dthis.is.a.test="A B C"

Java does not consider the quotes and complains:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: B

I tried with and without escaping, with single and double quotes and a couple other fancy variations, without success. Any help is welcome.

2

That's an array with one element, not two as you might have wanted.

Either of these will give two elements:
JAVA_OPTS=("-Xms256m" "-Xmx256m")
JAVA_OPTS=(-Xms256m -Xmx256m)

That seems like it could give Java heartburn, though it's not my language so I'm not sure.

3 
JAVA_HOME=/opt/jvm/jre1.5.0_18
JAVA_OPTS="-Xms256m -Xmx256m"
JAVA_OPTS="${JAVA_OPTS}" "-Dthis.is.a.test=\"A B C\"";
4

That's a problem. JAVA_OPTS will not change and bash will try to find and execute an executable by the name of -Dthis.is...

Though the basically, you're trying to put all the options into one string instead of into an array of strings. That's reasonable as long as no option has a space. Then it would be used like this, with NO QUOTES when used.

java $JAVA_OPTS some.java.class
5

Thank you both for your replies. Actually I had tried a version with String variable instead of Array. The exact syntaxt for it should be:

#!/bin/bash
JAVA_HOME=/opt/jvm/jre1.5.0_18
JAVA_OPTS="-Xms512m -Xmx512m"
JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Dthis.is.a.test=\"A B C\""
# ... and so on ...
echo ${JAVA_OPTS}
$JAVA_HOME/bin/java ${JAVA_OPTS} some.java.class

But this leads to the exact same result:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: B

The interpreter is not considering the " in "A B C".