Setting JAVA_HOME on Mac OS X

Some time ago I had set JAVA_HOME in my .profile on Mac OS X to the following:

JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/Home; export JAVA_HOME

To some extent this works, but it doesn’t apparently pick up your preferred JDK version that you can set via the Java Preferences app in /Applications/Utilities (you set your preferred version by dragging your choice to the top of the list).

To set JAVA_HOME to be set to your preferred version, use this instead:

JAVA_HOME=`/usr/libexec/java_home`; export JAVA_HOME

This post here talks about the first approach, but there’s a comment in response to the post that points out the second point.