Easy classpaths with Java 6
Back in the day it used to be a bit more difficult than it is now to dynamically generate your java application classpath - you'd have to write a script to loop over all the jar files in a directory, appending them to your classpath variable - like this . Since Java 6 though, its been a lot easier - you can use wildcards to specify all jars in a directory. See the "Understanding class path wildcards" in the Java SE 6 documentation . Now its as simple as: java -cp /my/lib/dir/* MyClass Simple! As it should be!