error starting tomcat 7 from eclipse

Question

im getting this error when starting my tomcat 7

can someone help me?

Mar 03, 2014 5:07:31 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap initClassLoaders
SEVERE: Class loader creation threw exception
java.io.IOException: Invalid argument
    at java.io.WinNTFileSystem.canonicalize0(Native Method)
    at java.io.Win32FileSystem.canonicalize(Unknown Source)
    at java.io.File.getCanonicalPath(Unknown Source)
    at java.io.File.getCanonicalFile(Unknown Source)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ClassLoaderFactory.createClassLoader(ClassLoaderFactory.java:171)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.createClassLoader(Bootstrap.java:176)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.initClassLoaders(Bootstrap.java:103)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.init(Bootstrap.java:208)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:406)

Answer 1

not sure if this is your problem but I received a similar error trying to starup Tomcat 6.

The problem was caused by this line in the catalina.properties file:

shared.loader=${catalina.base}/lib/*.jar,${catalina.base}/shared/classes,${catalina.home}/shared/lib/*.jar

You cant see it but there is an unprintable character following the *.jar which was being read as an invalid argument. After I deleted that character Tomcat came up sucessefully.

Answer 2

I had a similar issue and it was a ending back slash issue \ in CATALINA_HOME environment variable.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/22209500/1383538

Maybe a bit late; but for anyone else who may have this problem; it turned out i had put a backslash \ at the end on my CATALINA_HOME environment variable (I was using windows). When i removed it, i could start using catalina run command.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/28261336/1383538

Had a similar issue with Tomcat 8 and Java 8 on Windows 8, and after little bit of playing around, I noticed that CATALINA_HOME was set as "CATA_HOME=c:\mydir\tomcat.8.0\"

I just changed it to CATA_HOME=c:\mydir\tomcat.8.0" and it fixed all the issues. I never thought ending back slash would cause the issue but there you are...it did!!!