The case of evil brackets

It was just another day at work, setting up Tibco EMS with Weblogic server on my 32 Windows XP machine. Umm, you know what, that is not what I do most of the time. But lets keep it that way for this blog post. I had Tibco EMS installed on my machine, and wanted to put this path C:\Program Files\Tibco\ems\tibjms.jar in my ClassPath environment variable. I went ahead, and started the Weblogic server instance and it worked like a charm. The twist came when I had to set up another instance of Weblogic on another machine. But wait, that machine was a 64 bit machine. Tadaaaa!!(an evil music). Ok that was too much.

Anyways, I had Tibco ems installed there at C:\Program Files (x86)\Tibco\ems. (Ah, hence the post title ). I went about with the same steps mentioned above, and got a nasty ClassNotFound error while starting up Weblogic server instance. I have limited knowledge with Java, but this was surely some kind of class resolution problem. Hmm, I sure did put the path to the tibjms.jar file correctly. I had a bad feeling with those brackets, but just to make sure, I headed to StackOverflow, (yaya, I went to Google and then StackOverflow, pff…). As expected, there were many poor souls like myself who faced similar problem. The problem was certainly with the parenthesis present in the environment variable. The solution I applied was to not edit the ClassPath variable directly. But rather,  open the startweblogic.cmd file and append the C:\Program Files (x86)\Tibco\ems\tibjms.jar path to the      %CLASSPATH% variable in the cmd file. And the started the server, Skadooosh!!! But you know what, it really gets me thinking here, the folder “Program Files (x86)” is a folder name that Windows decided I believe, ClassPath usage is in the Java world. Did Windows do this with a purpose to torture folks trying to do Java on Windows .