title: Tomcat 6 vs 7 - lib vs shared/lib - jars only?
body: <p>When upgrading from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 - we kept a number of files we wanted on the classpath in the $CATALINA_HOME/lib directory on 6 - and it made sense to move these two $CATALINA_HOME/shared/lib on Tomcat 7. </p>
  
  <p>What we've found is that the jar files went across ok - but anything that wasn't a jar file - eg an xml file etc was not picked up by the class loaded in the shared/lib directory. When we moved the non-jar files back to the $CATALINA_HOME/lib directory - they loaded into the classpath without an issue. </p>
  
  <p><strong>My question is - is this a bug in the classloader in Tomcat 7? Or is this intended behaviour?</strong> (Failing to load non-jar files onto the classpath from the $CATALINA_HOME/shared/lib in a manner inconsistent to that which loads files from $CATALINA_HOME/lib)</p>
  
  <p>OS: Windows7</p>
  
  <p>Tomcat version: 7.0.30</p>
  
  <p>Java version: 1.7.0_11</p>