I thought the task should be fairly easy, but my understanding of javac and java in general is rather poor.

I am using Windows8 and would like to compile a single file.java that makes use of other classes. I successfully (at least without any warnings) compiled my file by calling:

javac -cp relative_path_to_needed_classes relative_path_to_file_java\file.java

Now if I want to run the result of compilation (file.class) by calling:

java -cp relative_path_to_needed_classes relative_path_to_file_java\file

I get:

Error: Could not find or load main class relative_path_to_file_java\file

I was trying a lot of combination to modify the -cp (eg. by adding .\;relative_path_to_file;) but still the closest where I get is:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError :
 relative_path_to_file\file (wrong name: file)

The file from (wrong name: file) is the name of the file and the name of the public class within the file. I was reading a lot on SO and other sources but could not figure out what is wrong. Btw. as a result of compilation some other classes were created:

file$1.class
file$name1.class
file$name2.class

(where name1 and name2 are names of private classes within file.java)

My questions are:

1. What is (the most) probably source of my error / what am I doing wrong?
2. What is the purpose of file$1.class?
3. What is the minimum I should specify in -cp?
4. May encoding play any role?
5. Do every java class have to reside in a package?
6. (rather not directly related to my issue) Do order of paths specified in -cp play any role in runtime?