Setting working directories for applications?

[Jeff Zaroyko]

On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 4:29 PM, Igor Tarasov <tarasov.igor at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello.
>
> This might be a known issue, but anyway: Some windows applications
> need that shortcut (launcher) have working directory set, and that
> working directory sometimes different from where the .exe is located.
>
> In Linux, with gnome and kde it is not a big problem, since .desktop
> launchers in these DE support Path attribute. But this becomes a
> problem with systems that don't support this out of box.
>
> As good as I am aware, XFCE have this problem - it's launchers ignore
> path attribute. Also, AFAIK, there are similar problems with mac
> version. There might be problems in other desctop enviroments, but I
> am not aware of these.
>
> Currently the only way to lauch such applications is either to use
> terminal and cd to working directory and then run application, or
> create custom bash launcher, which is too complicated for not
> experienced users (I mean not to reproduce it step-by-step, but to
> solve it by themselves).
>
> Is there anything that could be done in this area?
>
> --
> Igor
>
>
>

Hi Igor

There is Wine's start.exe which takes a /Unix option to start the
supplied file in unix path form, which both sets the working directory
and provides the commandline double quoting quirk which Windows
Explorer does.  So, instead of cd ~/.wine/drive_c/foo && wine bar.exe,
you can wine start /Unix ~/.wine/drive_c/foo/bar.exe

I think this is already used as part of DE, see tools/wine.desktop,
perhaps it would be a good idea to fix whatever is broken in XFCE and
others.

Jeff