Disabling Java in OS X requires doing so for each user account; however, even terminal commands for doing this may be a bit impractical to use as a substitute.

Writing code to parse command line arguments is still necessary sometimes. When you need to examine command line arguments, see how and why you should use your open source Java toolkit and use ...

You'd either include the paths in your invocations of javac and java with the -cp command line switch, or if you're using a build tool or IDE, it'll have its own method of managing the classpath.

But these aforementioned Java command-line tools -- namely, javac, javap, jstat, jdeps and jar -- are the five that serious software developers need to know.