Re: wine louses up display_2nd reply from Doug

On Tue, 2012-09-04 at 22:05 -0400, Doug wrote:
> Right-clicking on the Pinball icon on the screen 
> produces
> a box of Desktop Icon Settings, and under "Preview" is listed this, just 
> as I show it:
> 
> 
> [Desktop Entry]
> Name=Pinball
> Exec=env
> WINEPREFIX="/home/doug/wine"wine C:
> \\\\windows\\\\command\\\\start.exe
> /Unix
> /home/doug.wine/dosdevices/c:/users/do
> ug/Start\\
> Menu/Programs/Games/Pinball.lnk
> Type=Application
> StartupNotify=true
> Path=/home/doug/.wine/dosdevices/c:/Pro
> gram Files/Microsoft Games/Pinball
> Icon=E4EC_pinball.0
> 
That looks like a KDEism - I'm running XFCE, which is closer to Gnome in
the way it defines application launcher icons, etc.

> I'm afraid I am not familiar with the conventions used 
> here-- quadruple backslashes, etc.
> 
It's really a good idea to get somewhat familiar with shell scripting
because it makes customising the system to suit yourself easier and may
well be a lifesaver if anything breaks badly. If you consider yourself a
Windows power user, i.e. you can write .BAT files, diddle with the
directory, etc, I'd recommend getting a copy of 'Linux in a nutshell' -
its fairly terse because it assumes familiarity with at least one other
OS. Otherwise something like "Linux for Dummys" might be better despite
the rather off-putting name because the "...Dummys" books do assume
little prior knowledge.

In this case you're dealing with 'escaped' characters: the '\' character
affects the meaning of the following character, so \b represents a
backspace and \n a newline. If you want a literal backslash you write 
'\\' though its worth knowing that:

(1) Wine accepts either '\' or '/' within filename arguments on its
    filename and will replace '/' with '\' before passing the filename
    to the app.

(2) If the filename is enclosed in quotes then you don't need to escape
    backslashes: in the following the two commands are treated as
    identical:

    wine C:\\\\windows\\command\\start.exe
    wine "C:\\windows\command\start.exe"

Martin