title: Eclipse & JAR Hell
body: <p><strong>EDIT:</strong> I appreciate the suggestions for Ivy or Maven, but this is just not an option for me at this time. I do not have the authority to use those tools. I am simply looking for a way to get my referenced .classpath JARs into a folder inside my project.</p>
  
  <p>I have created a project that uses about 50 external JAR files that I referenced from other projects inside the same workspace.</p>
  
  <p>Thus, my project's directory strucure looks like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>MyProject
      src/
      test/
      Referenced Libraries/
          ... 50+ JARs
      lib/
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My project compiles and runs beautifully inside Eclipse. But now I need to add a buildscript so other developers can pull the project down from SVN and run it standalone. To do that, I'd like to place all the JARs that are currently in Eclipse's in-house directory <code>Referenced Libraries</code> and copy them into my project's <code>lib</code> directory which I will JAR-up with the final distribution.</p>
  
  <p>I'm in Package Explorer, and have tried to just copy + paste the files from <code>Referenced Libraries</code> to <code>lib/</code> and no dice. I get the following Eclipse error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Cannot paste the clipboard contents into the selected elements.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Anybody have any idea how I can force this copy operation to work? If I right-click any JAR inside <code>Referenced Libraries</code> I see an Eclipse option called <strong>Migrate JAR file</strong>, but I'm afraid that would <em>cut</em>-n-paste the JARs from their current location to the new <code>lib/</code> directory. This isn't feasible because there are many other projects that need these JAR files exactly where they are.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks for any insight here!</p>