One of the tools that I maintain has recently been updated with new functionality and as a result we had to update its MANIFEST.MF file to reference additional jar files in its classpath. Unfortunately the number of referenced jar files went over a limit and during Maven build the following error started to crop up...


The official documentation had the following note:


In my case, the line length was definitely over 72 bytes, so I proceeded to split each of the jar file dependencies out into its own line. My initial cut of the change had each new jar starting on a new line with a single space character at the beginning of the line. Unfortunately that produced garbage results - it appears that the single space character at the start of a line is a line continuation marker and is stripped when the full line is put together. This results in something like "dep-jar-1.jardep-jar-2.jardep-jar-3.jar..." being created.

Since we want each jar to be separate, a double space is required at the beginning of each line! This looks like the following...


With double spaces in place, everything worked as expected!



-i