Setting the default Java character encoding

Question

How do I properly set the default character encoding used by the JVM (1.5.x) programmatically?

I have read that -Dfile.encoding=whatever used to be the

Answer 1

mvn clean install -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -Dmaven.repo.local=/path-to-m2

command worked with exec-maven-plugin to resolve following error while configuring a jenkins task.

Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM warning: ignoring option MaxPermSize=512m; support was removed in 8.0
Error occurred during initialization of VM
java.nio.charset.IllegalCharsetNameException: "UTF-8"
    at java.nio.charset.Charset.checkName(Charset.java:315)
    at java.nio.charset.Charset.lookup2(Charset.java:484)
    at java.nio.charset.Charset.lookup(Charset.java:464)
    at java.nio.charset.Charset.defaultCharset(Charset.java:609)
    at sun.nio.cs.StreamEncoder.forOutputStreamWriter(StreamEncoder.java:56)
    at java.io.OutputStreamWriter.(OutputStreamWriter.java:111)
    at java.io.PrintStream.(PrintStream.java:104)
    at java.io.PrintStream.(PrintStream.java:151)
    at java.lang.System.newPrintStream(System.java:1148)
    at java.lang.System.initializeSystemClass(System.java:1192)