Retrieve environment variable (JNI)
For some odd reasons, the getenv() method was removed from the JDK. Rumors is that a mechanism to retrieve an environment will be back in JDK1.5 (see this HowTo ). But for now, you can use -D switch to retrieve named environment variable and pass them to the JVM (see this HowTo ) or use this JNI routine :
JNIEXPORT jstring JNICALL JavaHowTo_getenv (JNIEnv *env, jclass c, jstring jname){ if ( jname == NULL ) { return NULL ; } const char *name = (*env)->GetStringUTFChars(env, jname, (jboolean *)NULL) ; const char *value = getenv(name) ; (*env)->ReleaseStringUTFChars(env, jname, name) ; return value ? (*env)->NewStringUTF(env, value) : NULL ; }
NOTE : This is fine if the environment variable contains only regular 7-bit ASCII characters.
See also this HowTo .