What is the purpose of setting a CLASSPATH in Java?

Question

I just installed Java on a Mac for the first time (jdk 10.0.2 SE) and I'm on macOS 10.13.6. I just created a basic Hello World program in my home directory, compiled it and ran it, but I have nothing set on my CLASSPATH environment variable except for the current directory "." My question is how am I able to compile and run this program? How is it finding the classes from the Java library? I've always assumed I need to set this variable, and I have it set to my jdk installation directory in Windows.

Answer 1

WHY DO WE SET THE CLASS-PATH?

well this is an riveting question.

it is self explanatory as

CLASSPATH is an environment variable and contain

paths to the jar files and path to various packages.

KISS ANSWER TO YOUR QUERY:

Perhaps ,the reason behind successful execution of your code is that the JVM checks the current directory first for the perception of jar files and then follows the classpath .So your current directory has those files.

OH!You may wonder then why would we set the classpath .Setting the classpath overrides that by default path.

Happy Learning :)