Ubuntu – .Desktop EXEC universal home path

desktophome-directory

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

/home/username/.local/X this way works only for me

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

Best Answer

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.

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Unfortunately, .desktop files don't always call sub-shell $() commands the way we would like them to. One way to do this that I have found would be to create another script that contains the sub-shell command to open the file like that.

The Exec line would look like:

Exec=/path/to/script

then your script file would contain the command to open your new file:

#!/bin/sh

gedit ~/$(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S).txt

the script would also have to be executable:

chmod +x /path/to/script

Hope this helps!

Best Answer

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