difference between JAVA_PATH and JAVA_HOME

[Joseph Daniel Zukiger]

What's the difference?

Why do most of the linux instructions say to point JAVA_PATH to
JAVA_HOME (parent of the bin), but many university lab instructions
say to point JAVA_PATH to ${JAVA_HOME}/bin?

(Just not feeling comfortable here.)

[John Fereira]

joseph_dan...@yahoo.com (Joseph Daniel Zukiger) wrote in
news:d1de2cbe.04081...@posting.google.com:

> What's the difference?
>
> Why do most of the linux instructions say to point JAVA_PATH to
> JAVA_HOME (parent of the bin), but many university lab instructions
> say to point JAVA_PATH to ${JAVA_HOME}/bin?

I don't recall that I've ever seen a JAVA_PATH environment variable. Many
applications will use JAVA_HOME and add ${JAVA_HOME}/bin to the PATH
environment variable though. For example:

JAVA_HOME=/usr/local/jdk1.4.2
PATH=${PATH}:${JAVA_HOME}/bin

JAVA_HOME is also used by many other applications like Tomcat and various
IDEs.