Java™ Network Programming and Distributed Computing

2.8. System Properties

The notion of system properties will be recognizable to readers, as most operating systems support a similar concept in the form of environmental variables. Environmental variables contain control information, such as the path that dictates where an operating system will look for executable files. Indeed, as part of the reader's installation of Java, an environmental variable was probably independently set: the classpath, which controls where the JVM will look for class files.

System properties, within the context of Java, are specific to a JVM rather than an operating system (so two different JVMs can be assigned two different sets of properties). They can be used for a variety of purposes, such as controlling the configuration ...