What does java -cp "*" mean?

Question

I was working on the Stanford sentiment classifier on windows. I wanted to retrain my own model, and here's how it was specified on the website:

java -mx8g edu.stanford.nlp.sentiment.SentimentTraining -numHid 25 -trainPath train.txt -devPath dev.txt -train -model model.ser.gz

But this gave me the error:

could not find or load main class

But on changing it to java -cp "*" it worked.

Answer 1

Class path entries can contain the basename wildcard character , which is considered equivalent to specifying a list of all the files in the directory with the extension .jar or .JAR. For example, the class path entry foo/ specifies all JAR files in the directory named foo. A classpath entry consisting simply of * expands to a list of all the jar files in the current directory.

From Oracle Docs