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>For Linux and Mac (command-line only)

Why is this specific to Linux/Mac and command line. Windows has .bat files which can accomplish the same goal, and every filemanager I have used will recognize a script file and execute it when you try opening it.

Can you do the trick where the actual binary is embedded in the .sh with batch files? I think that's what he's talking about.

Exactly... I was talking about cat'ing the JAR file to a shell script. It's a pretty simple ant or maven task. (Or just 'cat script.sh myjar.jar > executable')

I don't know if this works on Windows or not... Never tried - it's been a long time since I've used Windows. And even then, if I needed to do command line work, I would install Cygwin. I don't know why it wouldn't work with batch files though. Do they get a reference to their own name as an argument?

As far as I remember, yes you can, but it required an external tool to do it.

In order to best integrate with the OS, you will probably have some runtime-specific settings that you'd like to apply (such as memory, or GUI specific-settings). If you just distribute a JAR, that can't be easily set.

The simplest solution is to have the JAR itself do this, relaunching the JVM if necessary.

Packr itself is distributed as a single JAR file, which I find a bit ironic.

> For Linux and Mac (command-line only) I've gotten into the habit wrapping up a JAR in a shell script

There is a Maven plugin to do this:

https://github.com/brianm/really-executable-jars-maven-plugi...

We use it for things like the Presto CLI.