"Unable to locate tools.jar" when running ant

java ant java-home tools.jar
john picture john · Feb 2, 2012 · Viewed 105.6k times · Source

When running ant, I get the following message:

Unable to locate tools.jar. Expected to find it in C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\lib\tools.jar

I have JAVA_HOME set to C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_02, PATH includes C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.7.0_02\bin, CLASSPATH includes C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.7.0_02, and ANT_HOME is set to C:\ant.

It seems that ant is ignoring all of these settings and looking for the tools.jar somewhere else. There are no environment variables which point to the jre6 path. Any ideas why?

Answer

Jayan picture Jayan · Feb 4, 2012

There are two directories that looks like JDK.

  C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_02
  C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.7.0_02\

This may be due to both 64 bit and 32 bit JDK installed? What ever may be the case, the java.exe seen by ant.bat should from the JDK. If the JRE's java.exe comes first in the path, that will be used to guess the JDK location.

Put 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.7.0_02\bin' or 'C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_02' as the first argument in the path.

Further steps:

You can take output of ant -diagnostics and look for interesting keys. (assuming Sun/Oracle JDK). 

 java.class.path 
 java.library.path
 sun.boot.library.path

(in my case tools.jar appears in java.class.path)

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