Eclipse Command Line Options

Moritz Post
August 22, 2013 | 2 min Read

Eclipse offers a huge number of command line options to configure many aspects. Some of the more popular ones are:

  • -clean
    • If set to “true”, any cached data used by the OSGi framework and eclipse runtime will be wiped clean. This will clean the caches used to store bundle dependency resolution and eclipse extension registry data. Using this option will force eclipse to reinitialize these caches.
  • -data
    • The instance data location for this session. Plug-ins use this location to store their data. For example, the Resources plug-in uses this as the default location for projects (aka the workspace). See the section on locations for more details.
  • -vm
    • When passed to the Eclipse executable, this option is used to locate the Java VM to use to run Eclipse. It should be the full file system path to an appropriate: Java jre/bin directory, Java Executable, Java shared library (jvm.dll or libjvm.so), or a Java VM Execution Environment description file.  If not specified, the Eclipse executable uses a search algorithm to locate a suitable VM. In any event, the executable then passes the path to the actual VM used to Java Main using the -vm argument. Java Main then stores this value in eclipse.vm.
  • -console
    • If set to a non-null value, the OSGi console (if installed) is enabled. This is handy for investigating the state of the system. The value syntax is [[host:]port] where the port and optional host name specify which port and hostname on which the console listens and directs its output to. If the value does not specify a valid port or hostname (including the empty string) then the console will listen to System.in and direct its output to System.out.
  • -consoleLog
    • If “true”, any log output is also sent to Java’s System.out (typically back to the command shell if any). Handy when combined with -debug

There are many more options available, so check out the complete list at the link above.

Moritz Post