How to include .jar in classpath so to have library included in compilation

Question

I have a folder full of *.jar files that I want to be included during compilation no matter what directory I'm in. As I currently understand it, and this could be completely wrong, I would have to make this change in /etc/environment. So my /etc/environment currently looks like this:

PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:
/usr/local/games:/~/Java/algs4/bin"
JAVA_HOME="usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64/jre/bin/java"
CLASSPATH="~/Java/algs4/bin:."

where ~/Java/algs4/bin is the directory where my .jars are. But when I try to compile a program that uses these libraries javac doesn't recognize the libraries. What am I fudging?

java version is 1.7.0_51

Thanks in advance.

Edit: Here's my code that I'm trying to get to work

FixedCapacityStackOfStrings.java

  public class FixedCapacityStackOfStrings{

    private String[] a;
    private int N;

    public FixedCapacityStackOfStrings(int cap){
        a = new String[cap];
    }

    public boolean isEmpty(){ return N == 0;}

    public int size()       { return N;}

    public void push(String item)
    {
        a[N++] = item;
    }

    public String pop()
    {
        return a[--N];
    }

    //test client
    public static void main(String[] args){
        FixedCapacityStackOfStrings s;
        s = new FixedCapacityStackOfStrings(100);
        while(!StdIn.isEmpty()){
            String item = StdIn.readString();
            StdOut.println(item);
            if (!item.equals("-"))
                s.push(item);
            else if(!s.isEmpty()) StdOut.print(s.pop() + " " );
        }
        StdOut.println("(" + s.size() + " left on stack)");
    }
}

Where StdOut and StdIn are the included in one of the .jar files in /bin. When I compile I get the error cannot find symbol for StdIn and StdOut

Answer 1

you should include all jar files in the classpath.

CLASSPATH=.
for j in ~/Java/algs4/bin/*.jar; do CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:$j done
export CLASSPATH

CLASSPATH environment is ':' separated entries, both jar/zip file and directory.

directory is used to search .class files, not jar file

Answer 2

Use CLASSPATH="~/Java/algs4/bin/*:."

Answer 3

Refer to this documentation. http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/tools/windows/classpath.html

Class path entries can contain the basename wildcard character *, which is considered equivalent to specifying a list of all the files in the directory with the extension .jar or .JAR. For example, the class path entry foo/* specifies all JAR files in the directory named foo. A classpath entry consisting simply of * expands to a list of all the jar files in the current directory.