Observe the Restricted Application

The last part of the Quick Tour of Controlling Applications lesson shows how an application can be run under a security manager by invoking the interpreter with the new -Djava.security.manager command-line argument. But what if the application to be invoked resides inside a JAR file?

One of the interpreter options is the -cp (for class path) option, that lets you specify a search path for application classes and resources. Therefore, to execute the Count application inside the sCount.jar JAR file, specifying the file C:\TestData\data as its argument, you can type the following command while in the directory containing sCount.jar:

java -cp sCount.jar Count C:\TestData\data

To execute the application with a security manager, add -Djava.security.manager, as shown below:

java -Djava.security.manager -cp sCount.jar Count C:\TestData\data

Important: When you run this command, your Java interpreter will throw an exception shown below:

Exception in thread "main" java.security.AccessControlException:
access denied (java.io.FilePermission C:\TestData\data read)
 at java.security.AccessControlContext.checkPermission(Compiled Code)
 at java.security.AccessController.checkPermission(Compiled Code)
 at java.lang.SecurityManager.checkPermission(Compiled Code)
 at java.lang.SecurityManager.checkRead(Compiled Code)
 at java.io.FileInputStream.<init>(Compiled Code)
 at Count.main(Compiled Code)

In this example, AccessControlException reported that the count application does not have permission to read the file C:\TestData\data. Your interpreter raised this exception because it will not allow any application running under a security manager to read a file or to access other resources unless it has explicit permission to do so -- usually specified in a grant statement contained in a policy file.