Find out where class was loaded from

Question

Is there a way to find out from what resource the java runtime loaded a class from? I know that -verbose:class argument will tell where classes were loaded from during runtime for only normal sun libs (core libraries from rt.jar), but it does not say where it is loading external stuff from. Can this be found out?
For example, if a particular third party class is available several times (through accidental redundancy in classpaths)-- find out which resource it was taken from.
I am sure you could get down into the weeds and look thorugh all the classpath entries for which ones contain which classes-- but there has got to be a better way.

Answer 1

import java.io.File;
import java.net.JarURLConnection;
import java.net.URL;
import java.net.URLDecoder;
private File getPathToClass(Class c)
     try
          URL url = getClass().getResource(c.getName() + ".class");
          if( url.getProtocol().equals("jar") )
               JarURLConnection jarCon = (JarURLConnection)url.openConnection();
               url = jarCon.getJarFileURL();
          File file = new File(URLDecoder.decode(url.getPath(), "UTF-8"));
          return file;
     catch(Exception e)
          return null;
}