Executing a Jar on Vista with a double click

Leonard H. Martin picture Leonard H. Martin · Dec 10, 2008 · Viewed 31.6k times · Source

This pretty much has me defeated.

On XP and earlier versions of Windows you could customise Open With filetypes to include java - jar "myjar.jar", but on Vista this functionality seems to have been removed. I can of course create a .bat file to launch my application, but is it possible to make Vista execute a .jar as required?

Answer

RealHowTo picture RealHowTo · Dec 10, 2008

You can do it from the command line with 2 utilities.

The first one, ASSOC, is used to create a file association. To verify if there is one defined for JAR type :

>assoc .jar
.jar=jarfile

If not found then create it with :

>assoc .jar=jarfile

The next step is to define the association. This is done with FTYPE.

To verify if one is already defined , type

>ftype jarfile
jarfile="C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_10\bin\javaw.exe" -jar "%1" %*

Again if not found or the wrong JRE is used, use FTYPE to fix the problem

>ftype jarfile="C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_10\bin\javaw.exe" -jar "%1" %*