Looks like an old bug in startup scripts, which has been fixed around 5.5.20, has been reintroduced (or hasn't been ported) in 6.0.X: CATALINA_OPTS variable is used for stopping, while it's supposed to be used for starting only: ------------------ elif [ "$1" = "stop" ] ; then shift FORCE=0 if [ "$1" = "-force" ]; then shift FORCE=1 fi "$_RUNJAVA" $JAVA_OPTS $CATALINA_OPTS \ -Djava.endorsed.dirs="$JAVA_ENDORSED_DIRS" -classpath "$CLASSPATH" \ -Dcatalina.base="$CATALINA_BASE" \ -Dcatalina.home="$CATALINA_HOME" \ -Djava.io.tmpdir="$CATALINA_TMPDIR" \ org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap "$@" stop ------------------ This makes impossible using JMX agent/jconsole as well as other tools which rely on socket listening. I'm not sure if catalina.bat does the same thing... I guess the latest 5.5.X version of catalina.sh (and probably .bat) shall be merged into 6.6.X tree...
Thanks for reporting this. Fixed in revision r558523 for TC 6.0.15. Also ported to trunk and 5.0.x.