Can I read the source code of a Jar file

[Lo]

Hi folks,

It's me again, I've managed to open the jar file with winzip but still cannot
read the code from the class file. Any way to do that ? By the way, how to
extract the jar file using the jar.exe, is it "jar fx source.jar target.txt"
? Thanks.


Lo

[jayaramreddy]

"Lo" <harry@startechmm.com> wrote:
>
>Hi folks,
>
>It's me again, I've managed to open the jar file with winzip but still cannot
>read the code from the class file. Any way to do that ? By the way, how
to
>extract the jar file using the jar.exe, is it "jar fx source.jar target.txt"
>? Thanks.
>
>
>Lo


You have to convert .class to .java file using tool like jad. U can even
use javap command to view this.

The basic command to use for extracting the contents of a JAR file is:

jar xf jar-file [archived-file(s)]

Let's look at the options and arguments in this command:

The x option indicates that you want to extract files from the JAR archive.

The f options indicates that the JAR file from which files are to be extracted
is specified on the command line, rather than through stdin.
The jar-file argument is the filename (or path and filename) of the JAR file
from which to extract files.
archived-file(s) is an optional argument consisting of a space-delimited
list of the files to be extracted from the archive. If this argument is not
present, the Jar tool will extract all the files in the archive.

[Paul Clapham]

You can't read the code from the class files because they are binary code to
be read by computers. They are not source code, that's in files called
something.java. As somebody else wrote, there are tools that will convert
class files back into an approximation of the original source, but many
people think that doing this is stealing their intellectual property. So
there are also tools that twist the class files so they can't be converted
back to source as easily...

PC2

Lo <harry@startechmm.com> wrote in message news:39ebcf02$1@news.devx.com...
>
> Hi folks,
>
> It's me again, I've managed to open the jar file with winzip but still
cannot
> read the code from the class file. Any way to do that ? By the way, how to
> extract the jar file using the jar.exe, is it "jar fx source.jar
target.txt"
> ? Thanks.
>
>
> Lo