[java] How can I restart a Java application?

Basically, you can't. At least not in a reliable way. However, you shouldn't need to.

The can't part

To restart a Java program, you need to restart the JVM. To restart the JVM you need to

1. Locate the java launcher that was used. You may try with System.getProperty("java.home") but there's no guarantee that this will actually point to the launcher that was used to launch your application. (The value returned may not point to the JRE used to launch the application or it could have been overridden by -Djava.home.)

2. You would presumably want to honor the original memory settings etc (-Xmx, -Xms, …) so you need to figure out which settings where used to start the first JVM. You could try using ManagementFactory.getRuntimeMXBean().getInputArguments() but there's no guarantee that this will reflect the settings used. This is even spelled out in the documentation of that method:

   Typically, not all command-line options to the 'java' command are passed to the Java virtual machine. Thus, the returned input arguments may not include all command-line options.

3. If your program reads input from Standard.in the original stdin will be lost in the restart.

4. Lots of these tricks and hacks will fail in the presence of a SecurityManager.

The shouldn't need part

I recommend you to design your application so that it is easy to clean every thing up and after that create a new instance of your "main" class.

Many applications are designed to do nothing but create an instance in the main-method:

public class MainClass {
    ...
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        new MainClass().launch();
    }
    ...
}

By using this pattern, it should be easy enough to do something like:

public class MainClass {
    ...
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        boolean restart;
        do {
            restart = new MainClass().launch();
        } while (restart);
    }
    ...
}

and let launch() return true if and only if the application was shut down in a way that it needs to be restarted.