When I’m working on different versions of Java, I set up a bunch of aliases so I can run commands quickly and compare differences. I recently upgraded my Mac and accepted the default shell as zshell instead of bash. (This change was made a long time ago but I didn’t upgrade for a long time because I didn’t want to incur the risk of being without my computer when everything was closed for the pandemic.)
Since I needed to move this from .bash_profile to .zshenv, I took the opportunity to shed a lot of them. I now have just Java 11 and Java 17 that I am using for comparisons. (LTS to LTS).
My .zshenv now contains this. (Yes, I know I should have patched Java 11, but alas.) I ran “source .zshenv” and am good to go.
Now I can run java11 JeanneTest.java and java17 JeanneTest.java to easily compare differences.
alias javac17=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-17-ea.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/javac
alias java17=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-17-ea.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/java
alias jar17=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-17-ea.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/jar
alias javac11=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-11.0.11.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/javac
alias java11=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-11.0.11.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/java
alias jar11=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-11.0.11.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/jar
alias jshell11=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-11.0..jdk/Contents/Home/bin/jshell
alias jdeps11=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-11.0.11.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/jdeps
alias jmod11=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-11.0.11.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/jmod
export JAVA_HOME="/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-17-ea.jdk/Contents/Home"