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.