Ubuntu

How to create a menu item and tell the program to start in a specific directory?

Asked by Uqbar

I'm running Ubuntu 8.10.
I've installed a software which has no menu item. So I created one.
I'd need it to start and use as current working directory at least my home dir and not /usr/local/bin (or whatever it thinks is its cwd).
How can I do that?

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Arnaud Soyez
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Arnaud Soyez (weboide) said : 		#1

Edit your menu item and change the command to (for example with gnome-terminal):

cd /the/path/you/want && gnome-terminal

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Uqbar (uqbar) said : 		#2

Trivially not working.

Could not launch menu item
Failed to execute child process "cd" (No such file or directory)

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Pierre Ferrari (piferrari) said : 		#3

Hi Uqbar,

What is the program you want to launch? Maybe he have parameters.
For example for gnome-terminal if you type «gnome-terminal --help» in an shell

$gnome-terminal --help
...
 --working-directory=DIRNAME
...

Then, in your menu item, write the command

gnome-terminal --working-directory=/path/to/your/dir

Regards

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enzo (vincenzo-romano-notorand) said : 		#4

I've checked and none of the programs has a "cwd" command line argument.
I can hardly believe that such a feature is missing, but the documentation I've seen so far doesn't show it.

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Uqbar (uqbar) said : 		#5

I confirm this: very few programs have an option much like the gnome-terminal's.
And now what?
How are you guys coping with such a need?

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Best Arnaud Soyez (weboide) said : 		#6

This works for me, you can replace gnome-terminal with your app:

bash -c "cd /tmp && (gnome-terminal &)"

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Uqbar (uqbar) said : 		#7

This last answer seems "dirt and tricky" but it works for me too.

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Uqbar (uqbar) said : 		#8

Thanks Arnaud Soyez (Weboide), that solved my question.

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Arnaud Soyez (weboide) said : 		#9

This is still a clean way to do this because "cd /tmp" only works with bash, so you need to start bash to execute it.