JDK 7 on OSX

You can download a dmg from Oracle’s download page. You might expect that you’d run the installer and you’d be ready to go. Not me.

I had previous versions of Java installed. In my startup file (.bash_profile) I had set this:

export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/Home/

1	export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/Home/

With this set, java -version still reported 1.6.

I set it to this and things worked.

export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_17.jdk/Contents/Home

1	export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_17.jdk/Contents/Home

That’s a bit clunky. There is a better way.

export JAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home)

1	export JAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home)

If you want to use another version, e.g. 1.6

export JAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home -v 1.6)

1	export JAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home -v 1.6)

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