'Passing the asterisk as command line argument to main in Eclipse

I'm working on a Java project in Eclipse and now I'd like to pass the asterisk * as a command line argument to the main. I'm aware of the fact that this is a wildcard symbol and in every shell it works fine by simply putting it into quotes, so instead of java MyProgram * I'd type java MyProgram "*".

In Eclipse (Run Cofigurations -> Arguments) it doesn't work either way, even with quotes it just lists all files inside the directory. Single quotes as in '*' works the same way as a*a or something, meaning the single quotes (or apostrophes) will be passed into the string, too.

Any ideas how to get the * into the main?

javaeclipse


Solution 1:[1]

Eclipse expands the * into a list of property names. So the program is actually passed (on my system) an args array of: .classpath, .project, .settings, .bin, .src Instead of the * .

If I put ANY text with the , like "X", then I get the "X*".

Doubles quotes does not help. Neither does escaping it with a slash.

From the shell it works fine, although a warning on Windows at least that you do need to put it in quotes. Windows will strip the quotes before the program gets it.

But under Eclipse, I can find no workaround that allows passing just a * .

Solution 2:[2]

To anyone running into the same problem, you need to write it as "* " for eclipse to pass it as *

Solution 3:[3]

It's a programming bug in your own program. Eclipse passes the main arguments verbatim to your program. You can easily check this by creating a Java program which has only this one line in main:

System.out.println(args[0]);

and passing an asterisk as the only argument to that program in the run configuration. That prints the single asterisk character, as expected.

Sources

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Source: Stack Overflow

Solution Source
Solution 1 Dave
Solution 2 Fabi
Solution 3 Bananeweizen

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