Today I tried to start iReport for the first time on the Mac. There was a shell script distributed with the program, so I gave it a shot in the Terminal. Unfortunately I got an exception immediately.

Stryker:iReport-2.0.3 2 siker$ chmod a+x iReport.sh
Stryker:iReport-2.0.3 2 siker$ ./iReport.sh
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: 2


I fooled around with the script for a while. Seeing that it was trying to generate its class path using creative uses of dirname on the first script argument, I figured that maybe it’d help to run the program with the full path specified like so:

Stryker:iReport-2.0.3 2 siker$ "`pwd`/iReport.sh"


That didn’t do it though. After looking at the script some more I realized they were pretty lax with quoting. That was it. Moving the software to a location without spaces in the path solved the problem and made iReport start up just fine.

Stryker:iReport-2.0.3 2 siker$ cd ..
Stryker:Downloads siker$ mv iReport-2.0.3 2 ~/iReport
Stryker:Downloads siker$ cd ~/iReport/
Stryker:iReport siker$ ./iReport.sh


Hope that helps someone running into the same problem. I would post a bug report but I saw someone was two steps ahead already and had created a clickable Mac application and submitted a build file. That’s clearly the preferable solution.