[Wine] Wine Executes Locally, But Not With Absolute Path

[Martin Gregorie]

On Wed, 2012-02-01 at 16:41 -0600, winepunk wrote:
> I meant to say that line works.  Why should Wine be finicky?
> 
Its the Windows app thats finicky, not Wine. 

Many Windows apps are written to assume that they'll be started in the
directory that contains things they need to run, such as app-specific
DLLs, .ini files etc. In *nix terminology this is called the current
working directory. *nix, i.e. Linux and OS/X, programs, on the othyer
hand, are written on the assumption that the data files the program will
use are in the current working directory and the program itself will be
somewhere else in the search path (defined in by $PATH).

Wine, being a *nix program, naturally uses the conventions of its host
OS. As a result, running 

	wine path/to/app/dir/app.exe

will leave the current working directory set to where you issued the
command from ($HOME if you just logged in) and some Windows apps may
work, but most will complain that they can't find stuff that's in their
installation directory. OTOH running

	cd path/to/app/dir; wine app.exe

will first change directory to path/to/app/dir, make it the current
working directory and then run app.exe in that directory. Since that's
effectively what Windows always does, it will work with all Windows
apps.


Martin