How to get VM arguments from inside of Java application?

At startup pass this -Dname=value

and then in your code you should use

value=System.getProperty("name");

to get that value

I found that HotSpot lists all the VM arguments in the management bean except for -client and -server. Thus, if you infer the -client/-server argument from the VM name and add this to the runtime management bean's list, you get the full list of arguments.

Here's the SSCCE:

import java.util.*;
import java.lang.management.ManagementFactory;

class main {
  public static void main(final String[] args) {
    System.out.println(fullVMArguments());
  }

  static String fullVMArguments() {
    String name = javaVmName();
    return (contains(name, "Server") ? "-server "
      : contains(name, "Client") ? "-client " : "")
      + joinWithSpace(vmArguments());
  }

  static List<String> vmArguments() {
    return ManagementFactory.getRuntimeMXBean().getInputArguments();
  }

  static boolean contains(String s, String b) {
    return s != null && s.indexOf(b) >= 0;
  }

  static String javaVmName() {
    return System.getProperty("java.vm.name");
  }

  static String joinWithSpace(Collection<String> c) {
    return join(" ", c);
  }

  public static String join(String glue, Iterable<String> strings) {
    if (strings == null) return "";
    StringBuilder buf = new StringBuilder();
    Iterator<String> i = strings.iterator();
    if (i.hasNext()) {
      buf.append(i.next());
      while (i.hasNext())
        buf.append(glue).append(i.next());
    }
    return buf.toString();
  }
}

Could be made shorter if you want the arguments in a List<String>.

Final note: We might also want to extend this to handle the rare case of having spaces within command line arguments.

With this code you can get the JVM arguments:

import java.lang.management.ManagementFactory;
import java.lang.management.RuntimeMXBean;
...
RuntimeMXBean runtimeMxBean = ManagementFactory.getRuntimeMXBean();
List<String> arguments = runtimeMxBean.getInputArguments();