if anyone's interested (and i know you are

) i finally
got the lo-down.
i made a few directories in my home/me directory. i put in a
com/jmg/num and in that directory i put the Factorial.java
file---but i added a line to the top of it:
package com.jmg.num;
I further changed my CLASSPATH to include home/me.
Now i can run my little Factorial program from any
directory i want.
see, (again, for any greenhorns who are interested)
when you put a directory in your class path, you're telling
the JRE where to look for classes it needs to load at runtime.
you're talking to the JRE.
when you put the package line in the .java file, you're talking
to the compiler. you're telling the compiler how to fully
qualify the class names of the classes you're about to declare.
when you're done compiling, the package line in the source file
has done its job, and javac has turned classnames like Factorial
into their buf fully-qualified names, like
com.jmg.num.Factorial
when you go to execute your program from the command line,
you can execute the whole java command from anywhere 'cause:
a. you've included /usr/local/jdk1.3/bin (or some path like that) in your PATH, so the OS knows where to find java.
b. you've specifed the CLASSPATH so java knows where to start
looking for classes.
c. you've given the fully-qualified class name to be
interpreted:
[/etc]$ java com.jmg.num.Factorial 8