Removing jrunscript tool from the JDK
Jaikiran Pai
jaikiran.pai at oracle.com
Wed Sep 17 05:06:06 UTC 2025
The JDK has been shipping the jrunscript tool in $JAVA_HOME/bin/
directory since Java 6. The goal of that tool was to provide a
read-eval-print scripting shell for users to experiment/explore
scripting language(s) through the javax.script API. This tool has always
been experimental and unsupported as noted in its man page
https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/25/docs/specs/man/jrunscript.html.
In JDK 24 we deprecated this tool for removal (details are available in
https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8341610). In JDK 26, it is being
proposed to be removed https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8367157. As
far as I (and others that I have talked to) are aware, this tool hasn't
seen wide usage and there may be very few usages of this left (if any).
In fact, even before it was deprecated for removal, the default usage of
this tool has been non-functional since JDK 15 when Nashorn was removed.
The default use of that tool leads to an error message being printed
about non-availability of any script engines.
Given all this, I think the move to remove this tool in JDK 26 seems
reasonable. It was suggested that before integrating this change, I
check here once in jdk-dev to see if anyone knows of any remaining
usages of this tool. I look forward to hearing if there are any usages left.
-Jaikiran
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