java - What's the difference between program arguments and VM arguments?

Question

I found only when I put -Dcontext=web into VM arguments, the value can be read by System.getproperty method. I am wondering what's the difference between those two?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5751851/whats-the-difference-between-program-arguments-and-vm-arguments

Answer 1

Program arguments are arguments passed to your program and available in the args array of your main method

 public static void main(String[] args)

VM arguments are passed to the virtual machine and are designed to instruct the VM to do something. You can do things like control the heap size, etc. They can be accessed by your program via a call to System.getProperty() as you described.