IDEs make programming so simple, but the moment you walk outside of your comfort zone (e.g. a terminal), compiling a huge program becomes a nightmare. It’s not too bad if you use something like Maven or Gradle.
The basic behind compiling big projects is that you need to compile all of them at the same time because some library require other libraries, which also require more libraries.
First, we need to get the path of every files ending with java in the root of the project directory:
find -name "*.java" > paths.txt # for Linux
dir /s /B *.java > paths.txt # for Windows
Afterward, we can compile it in bin/:
javac -d "bin" @paths.txt
And that’s about it! The same hierarchy as src/ will be kept in bin/ but if you have some libraries (.jar files) that should be compiled with the rest of the project, then it should look like this:
javac -d "bin" -cp lib/somelib.jar:lib/someotherlib.jar @paths.txt
NOTE: On Windows, use ; instead of :.
Also, if you get an error while compiling about an import in the main class from a subpackage, try compiling by using the following command (assuming that the .java files are in a folder called src/):
javac -d "bin" @paths.txt -cp "src/"