"Could not find the main class. Program will exit"

The classpath is the path that the system will follow when trying to find the classes that you're trying to run. In the batch file you're trying to execute it probably has a variable like CLASSPATH=blah;blah;etc or a java command that looks similar to

java -classpath "c:\directory\lib\squirrel-sql.jar" com.some.squirrel.package.file

If you can find or add that classpath setting, make sure that it includes a path to the squirrel-sql.jar and any other jar files that it may depend on separated by semicolons (or the root /lib directory that may be included with the installation).

Basically you just need to tell java where to find the class files that you're trying to execute. Wikipedia has a more indepth discussion about classpath and can offer you more insight. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classpath_(Java)


Is Java installed on your computer? Is the path to its bin directory set properly (in other words if you type 'java' from the command line do you get back a list of instructions or do you get something like "java is not recognized as a .....")?

You could try try running squirrel-sql.jar from the command line (from the squirrel sql directory), using:

java -jar squirrel-sql.jar

  1. JAVA_HOME variable must be set, to point to the prog files/java/version???/bin
  2. open squirrel-sql.bat file with some text editor and see if the JAVA_HOME variable there is the same as the one in your enviroment variable
  3. change it if it doesn't match....and than run bat file again