Question

In a bash shell script I tried these two versions:

java -jar abc.jar&

and

CMD="java -jar abc.jar&"
$CMD

The first verison works, and the second version complains that abc.jar cannot be found. Why?

Answer 1

Commands do run from current directory in a shell script.

This is why the first command in your test script worked.

The second command may not work because either java isn’t in your ${PATH} or abc.jar isn’t in your ${CLASSPATH}. You could echo these environment variables or set +x to debug your bash script.