Java 6 introduced the capability of selecting all jar files in a directory for the classpath rather than having to list every jar file. With Groovy 1.7.1, Groovy caught up with this capability…sort of.
(It is a little odd to me that Groovy had to catch up to this in the first place actually; it seems like Groovy might have addressed this syntactic simplification in the spirit of doing the right thing before Java did.)
Starting with the Java 6 syntax, wilcard support is simply “*” following a directory reference, like “./lib/*”. So when running Groovy you might do this.
groovy -classpath "../batch.jar;../lib/*;." testClasspath
Note that the wildcard needs to be in quotes on Unix or the shell will take over exploding it. This does not work at all on Windows though. Just about anything you try along this line results in:
The syntax of the command is incorrect.
To avoid this error in Windows you must not put anything but the wildcard entry in the classpath and eliminate the quotes. This makes it a very limited solution at best.
groovy -classpath ../lib/* testClasspath
All of these Windows problems tie to the processing of the classpath by startGroovy.bat. While I do not have a solution to that, it seems to be avoidable by setting the CLASSPATH environment variable rather than trying to pass it into the groovy script.
set CLASSPATH=../batch.jar;../lib/*;.
groovy testClasspath
