Setting working directories for applications?

[James McKenzie]

Igor Tarasov wrote:
> Hi Jeff
>
>   
>> 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
>>     
>
> Well, I've already have looked into start.exe, and it does not provide
> functionality I need.
>
> Look: we have some program, prog.exe It is located it
> ~/.wine/drive_c/foo/ . But it needs it's working dir to be set to
> ~/.wine/drive_c/foo/bar. So, from terminal you can launch it this way:
>
> cd ~/.wine/drive_c/foo/bar
> wine ../prog.exe
>
> Start.exe won't help here, as I don't see any path-related options there.
>
> When installing such application, wine woul convert .lnk into .desktop
> that look like this (irrelevant options skipped):
>
> [Desktop Entry]
> Name=Da Prog
> Exec[$e]=env WINEPREFIX="/home/user/.wine-wt" wine "C:\\foo\\prog.exe"
> Path[$e]=$HOME/.wine/dosdevices/c:/foo/bar
>
> XFCE ignores Path attribute, and prog.exe won't launch or would
> complain it can't find some files and needs to be reinstalled.
>
> Mac also have some problems with this.
>
> BTW, according to freedesktop specification Path attribute is optional.
> http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/desktop-entry-spec-latest.html
>
>   
The problem is that you are technically working in Windows and the
working directory may need to be set in the registry.  Please look at
this in a working Windows configuration.  I have found in these cases
that using regedit and duplicating the setup does tend to work.

And the fact that you are using a Mac does not have anything to do with
this situation, it is a 'broken' feature of Windows that Wine has to
reproduce properly.

James McKenzie