The Manifest
The jar program automatically generates a manifest when the archive is created (unless you specify the M option). The manifest is always named manifest.mf and placed into a directory named META-INF, and is made up of one or more sections, each of which describes an entry in the archive. Sections in the manifest are separated by a blank line.
Each section in the manifest contains a series of attribute/value
pairs. These pairs are used to specify various attributes of the
contents of the archive. The entries in the manifest take the form
attribute: value, where the attribute is
immediately followed by a colon and whitespace, and then the value.
The first section in the archive is used to identify the manifest
version used by the archive. The name of the attribute is
Manifest-Version. The only
version currently supported is 1.0, so the
first section of the manifest looks like this:
Manifest-Version: 1.0
The version section is followed by sections that describe the
elements contained in the archive. Each section contains an attribute
called Name
that identifies the name of
the archived element. The jar program also
produces some hash values for the archived element. Each of these
values is entered into the manifest. The
Digest-Algorithms
attribute specifies one or more hash
algorithms used to generate hash values for the element. This is
followed by attributes for each of the algorithms, with the
associated hash value.
To get a better idea of what these entries look ...
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