Question

so I have a pretty large project in Eclipse which runs fine and accesses files etc. And when in Eclipse I access files with a local directory name in relation to the root of the project directory.

So my project is called “Project1” for example and is inside a directory called “MyProjects” so it looks like this: “MyProjects/Project1”. I want to access a file in the “MyProjects” folder called “hello.text”. So I just do “../hello.text” and it works fine when I do this in Eclipse.

The problem I have is when I run the program using the command using “java Project1” it runs the program fine but it cannot access that file because when executing programs from the command line it stars them from the “bin” directory which is inside of the “Project1” directory. So it messes up the whole program. Is there anyway to change this easily in my Windows environment or Eclise? I hope my question makes sense. I want the program to execute from “Project1” directory if possible so I don’t have to change the file location everytime.

Answer 1

You can use one of ClassLoader class methods

public URL getResource(String name)
or 
public InputStream getResourceAsStream(String name)

to locate and access any resource in the classpath in a way that is independent of the location of the code. For exaple

InputStream myTextFileStream = Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader().getResourceAsStream("Project1/Hello.txt") ;