Question

I can’t seem to find a way to launch the Clojure REPL with the contrib library included. If I understood the documentation correctly then this command should do it:

C:\clojure-1.1.0>"%ProgramFiles%\Java\jre6\bin\java.exe" -cp clojure.jar:clojure
-contrib.jar clojure.main
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: clojure/main
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: clojure.main
        at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(Unknown Source)
        at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
        at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(Unknown Source)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
        at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
Could not find the main class: clojure.main.  Program will exit.

But as you can see, it fails. I did copy the clojure-contrib.jar to the C:\clojure-1.1.0 folder.

Can someone help me get it right?

Update
Thanks to Michał’s post I noticed that my error was using a colon where I had to use a semi-colon. This works:

C:\clojure-1.1.0>"%ProgramFiles%\Java\jre6\bin\java.exe" -cp clojure.jar;clojure-contrib.jar clojure.main
Clojure 1.1.0
user=> 

Answer 1

(Answer updated to make the actual solution explicit, whereas it was somewhat hidden in the original…)

The classpath string on Windows uses ; as the separator. E.g.

java.exe -cp "C:\clojure-1.1.0\clojure.jar;C:\clojure-1.1.0\clojure-contrib.jar" clojure.main

Alternatively, you can use a wildcard to include all jars in the given directory in the classpath (that’s a JDK 1.6 addition, wouldn’t work with 1.5):

java.exe -cp "C:\clojure-1.1.0\*" clojure.main

(I think using double quotes here is ok in Windows, can’t check though…)