I have been trying to run a fat Spring Boot Jar which has a third party library which loads a .properties from the classpath. The .properties file is not inside the jar file.
The required .properties is in a folder other than the /lib or /config or root where the fat jar is located.
I have set the CLASSPATH variable to include the external folder where the .properties file is residing. 
I tried giving -cp and -classpath also when running the fat jar using java -jar command but to no avail.
I tried using --loader.path but no success.
The Exception I am getting is;
java.lang.NullPointerException: null
        at java.util.Properties$LineReader.readLine(Properties.java:434)
        at java.util.Properties.load0(Properties.java:353)
        at java.util.Properties.load(Properties.java:341)