Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/commons/codec/DecoderException

Do I hate Java or what? I have been trying to compile a searchServer program but was stuck on the following error for quite long:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/commons/codec/DecoderException

I had placed the commons-codec-1.2.jar in my class path when compiling using -cp and was including the needed classes in my program via import.

The solution was to add the path to commons-codec-1.2.jar in my .bashrc file and then export it.

Frank