In this article, we will show you How to Open JAR File Using Command Line. Web browsers used Java to provide a dynamic browsing experience. Games and other interactive applets were programmed with Java and could run on any platform. However, there was one small problem. Multiple HTTP requests were required to download all the elements necessary for the applet to function, which slowed down the load time.
A better approach would be to put all the files into a single file that Java could access to run an application. And that’s exactly what the JAR file is. Inspired by WinZip, JAR is a file archive used by Java to store everything from multimedia files to code, and accessed by Java applets. The jar tool offers you two ways to examine your JAR archive. The first method displays the contents without extracting them. The second method is to extract the contents of the JAR file to a file system. You can also check our article on Run JAR Files on Windows 11
How to Open JAR File Using Command Line
Viewing Contents of a JAR File
- In its simplest form, you can use jar to open a JAR file like this:
jar tf YourJarFile.jar
- The t option tells the jar tool to output a table of contents. The f option tells jar to open a file rather than read an archive from stdin.
- The order in which you indicate these options doesn’t matter. However, you need to ensure that there’s no space between them.
- The example shown above assumes that your JAR file is in the current working directory. If it isn’t, then you can indicate the file path instead of just the file name.
- To view more details about a JAR file, such as the date of creation, you can use the verbose option, v.
jar tfv YourJarFile.jar
Extracting a JAR File
- You can extract the contents of a JAR file using a command like this:
jar xf YourJarFile.jar
- The x option directs the jar tool to extract the archive’s contents. This command will copy the contents of the JAR file into the current directory. It will match the directory structure of the items in the JAR file.
- You may want to extract particular items from your JAR file rather than the entire contents. In such a case, you can indicate these items after the JAR filename:
jar xf YourJarFile.jar login.html payment.html
- This command will extract two HTML files from the JAR file, if they exist inside it.
Final Words
We hope you like this article on How to Open JAR File Using Command Line. In this article, we learned two ways of opening a JAR application with command line. JAR files are a great way to share and distribute our code with others. And if you encounter an error while opening the .JAR file, the above steps will help you to solve it.
There are so many programs that can help you open a JAR file, and the conversion is not too difficult either. Coral WinZip is the best option to open a JAR file, as it is available for almost all platforms and is easy to use. You can also use WinRAR or 7-Zip if you have them pre-installed on your system.
I hope you understand this article, How to Open JAR File Using Command Line.
