What is JAVA_HOME? How does the JVM find the javac path stored in JAVA_HOME?

JAVA_HOME and JRE_HOME are not used by Java itself. Some third-party programs (for example Apache Tomcat) expect one of these environment variables to be set to the installation directory of the JDK or JRE. If you are not using software that requires them, you do not need to set JAVA_HOME and JRE_HOME. PATH is an environment variable used by the operating system (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) where it will look for native executable programs to run. You should add the bin subdirectory of your JDK installation directory to the PATH, so that you can use the javac and java commands and other JDK tools in a command prompt window. Courtesy: coderanch

set environment variable

JAVA_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_24

classpath=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_24\lib\tools.jar

path=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_24\bin

JVM does not find java.exe. It doesn't even call it. java.exe is called by the operating system (Windows in this case).

JAVA_HOME is just a convention, usually used by Tomcat, other Java EE app servers and build tools such as Gradle to find where Java lives.

The important thing from your point of view is that the Java /bin directory be on your PATH so Windows can find the .exe tools that ship with the JDK: javac.exe, java.exe, jar.exe, etc.

The command prompt wouldn't use JAVA_HOME to find javac.exe, it would use PATH.