Java in a Nutshell, 5th Edition

Name

javac — The Java Compiler

Synopsis

javac [ options ] files
               

Description

javac is the Java compiler; it compiles Java source code (in .java files) into Java byte codes (in .class files). The Java compiler is itself written in Java.

javac can be passed any number of Java source files, whose names must all end with the .java extension. javac produces a separate .class class file for each class defined in the source files. Each source file can contain any number of classes, although only one can be a public top-level class. The name of the source file (minus the .java extension) must match the name of the public class it contains.

In Java 1.2 and later, if a filename specified on the command line begins with the character @, that file is taken not as a Java source file but as a list of compiler options and Java source files. Thus, if you keep a list of Java source files for a particular project in a file named project.list, you can compile all those files at once with the command:

% javac @project.list
               

To compile a source file, javac must be able to find definitions of all classes used in the source file. It looks for definitions in both source-file and class-file form, automatically compiling any source files that have no corresponding class files or that have been modified since they were most recently compiled.

Common options

The most commonly used compilation options include the following:

-classpath path

Specifies the path javac uses to look up classes referenced in the specified ...