nope. You need to parse the commandline yourself and determine which is the properties file. Or more likely you will force a specific name and location on the file and read it from there. Or have another properties file at a specific name and location and read the name and location of the properties file from there
I guess I was looking for something of the Properties class in conjunction with the -D switch... Rather then saying arg1=value1 arg2=value2 ... to pass a file.
If you pass the pathname to the file into the main method, you can create from that String a FileInputStream which can then be loaded into a Properties object.
You could also use the -D option in conjunction with some new system property - e.g. java -Dleslies.properties.file=foo/bar/config.properties MyClass Then use that system property to load the Properties: