Running a .desktop file in the terminal
gtk-launch
With any recent Ubuntu that supports gtk-launch
just simply go
gtk-launch <file>
Where <file>
is the name of the .desktop
file with or without the .desktop
part. The name must not include the full path.
The .desktop
file must be in /usr/share/applications
, /usr/local/share/applications
or ~/.local/share/applications
.
So gtk-launch foo
opens /usr/share/applications/foo.desktop
(or foo.desktop
located in one of the other permitted directories.)
From gtk-launch
documentation:
gtk-launch launches an application using the given name. The application is started with proper startup notification on a default display, unless specified otherwise.
gtk-launch takes at least one argument, the name of the application to launch. The name should match application desktop file name, as residing in /usr/share/application, with or without the '.desktop' suffix.
Usable from terminal or Alt + F2 (Alt + F2 stores command in history so it's easily accessible).
The answer should be
xdg-open program_name.desktop
But due to a bug (here on upstream) this no longer works.
Modern Answer
gtk-launch <app-name>
- where <app-name>
is the file name of the .desktop
file, with or without the .desktop
extension.
See another answer on this thread for more details. I got this info from that answer.
Deprecated shell tools answer
Written a long time ago - see the comments below this answer as to why this approach won't work for many desktop files.
The command that is run is contained inside the desktop file, preceded by Exec=
so you could extract and run that by:
$(grep '^Exec' filename.desktop | tail -1 | sed 's/^Exec=//' | sed 's/%.//' \
| sed 's/^"//g' | sed 's/" *$//g') &
To break that down
grep '^Exec' filename.desktop # - finds the line which starts with Exec
| tail -1 # - only use the last line, in case there are
# multiple
| sed 's/^Exec=//' # - removes the Exec from the start of the line
| sed 's/%.//' # - removes any arguments - %u, %f etc
| sed 's/^"//g' | sed 's/" *$//g' # - removes " around command (if present)
$(...) # - means run the result of the command run
# here
& # - at the end means run it in the background
You could put this in a file, say ~/bin/deskopen
with the contents
#!/bin/sh
$(grep '^Exec' $1 | tail -1 | sed 's/^Exec=//' | sed 's/%.//' \
| sed 's/^"//g' | sed 's/" *$//g') &
Then make it executable
chmod +x ~/bin/deskopen
And then you could do, e.g.
deskopen /usr/share/applications/ubuntu-about.desktop
The arguments (%u
, %F
etc) are detailed here. None of them are relevant for launching at the command line.