.Desktop EXEC universal home path

Question

I am making .desktop for teamspeak as their programmers didn't.

It ought to work for everyone and to do so I need to target home folder universaly with EXEC.

So let's pretend program X is in ~/.local

EDIT: This solved it for EXEC but doesn't apply to the ICON thus I placed it to /usr/share/icons which is workaround.

why did you accept an answer that does not even possibly work?? Relative paths like $HOME do not work in a .desktop file. — Jacob Vlijm, Feb 20 '16 at 22:21
" That's not enough. See askubuntu.com/a/139198/158442 – muru Feb 19 at 19:37 " as you can see it was posted before you did comment here and I have had also already included in my EDIT.. so congratulations for writing before reading. — Tichun, Feb 24 '16 at 21:20
I mentioned you accepted an answer before the edit was made on the answer (an edit after my comments on the answer). You should accept an answer, not including a comment in your own question. As said, you accepted a non working answer. — Jacob Vlijm, Feb 24 '16 at 21:25

score 6 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 08 '21 at 14:52

6

You can use the environment variable HOME. It stores the absolute path to the current user's home folder.

Here's how you can use it:

Exec=/bin/sh -c "$HOME/.local/X"

It's very important putting the $ before HOME so it's read as a variable. Also do not forget write HOME in capital letters only.

Don't forget to wrap shell variable using " double quote else it will fail at execution time.

edited Jun 08 '21 at 14:52

vrkansagara

answered Feb 19 '16 at 19:20

Eduardo Cola

That's not enough. See http://askubuntu.com/a/139198/158442 – muru Feb 19 '16 at 19:37
@EduardoCola I'd appreciate if you don't take it as-, -nor make it- a personal thing. When using sh -c or /bin/bash -c anything can be done, since either sh or bash is running the command then. When using your construction directly in the Exec= line, it simply doesn't possibly work, and the answer is a non- working one. You shouldn't want that. Accepted or not. – Jacob Vlijm Feb 20 '16 at 23:41
plasmashell expands ~ in Exec just fine, no need for /bin/sh. – Maxim Egorushkin Sep 11 '22 at 11:04
@MaximEgorushkin Just checked: it does not expand ~ in Exec, but it does expand $HOME (without sh -c ...) – Shevchuk Feb 14 '23 at 02:03
@Shevchuk Your experience is different from mine. I invoke my *.desktop files with Exec=~/... on daily basis and plasmashell executes them without fail. My login shell is /bin/bash. You may like to verify your checks. – Maxim Egorushkin Feb 22 '23 at 00:50
@Shevchuk Post a minimal, complete and reproducible example if you need help. – Maxim Egorushkin Feb 22 '23 at 01:14

1 Answers1