Installing Visual COBOL into other instances of Eclipse

Visual COBOL ships with Eclipse 4.16 (2020-06).

After installing Visual COBOL, you can then also install it in other instances of Eclipse 4.16 (2020-06) available on the same machine; no other versions of Eclipse are supported.

Note: Refer to Software Requirements for details on the libraries required to be able to plug Visual COBOL into Eclipse 4.16 (2020-06).

To assist you with automatically installing the Micro Focus plug-ins in other instances of Eclipse, Visual COBOL provides an installation utility, installeclipseplugins (UNIX) available in /opt/microfocus/VisualCOBOL/eclipse.

To use the script to install Visual COBOL into another instance of Eclipse:

  1. Start a terminal.
  2. At the terminal, navigate to the location of the install utility.
  3. Run the install utility from the command prompt using the following syntax:
    installeclipseplugins -eclipse <EclipsePath> [-cobdir <CobdirPath>] [-nosplash]

    where:

    EclipsePath
    Full path to the installation directory of the instance of Eclipse you are installing into.
    CobdirPath
    Optional - the full path to the installation directory of Visual COBOL. If this is not specified, the COBDIR environment variable is used.
    -nosplash
    Optional - if set, the installation does not replace the existing splash screen. A non-default Eclipse splash screen is not replaced, regardless of this setting.
    Note: Ensure that your PATH is set to a 64-bit version of Java. The default COBDIR location, in UNIX environments, /opt/microfocus/ProductName. Alternatively, the COBDIR can be specified on the command line.

    Running the utility installs the Visual COBOL plug-ins into the specified Eclipse instance.