Running a .desktop file in the terminal

Question

From what I can gather, .desktop files are shortcuts that allow application's settings to be customized. For instance, I have lots of them in my /usr/share/applications/ folder.

If I open that folder in nautilus, I can run these applications just by double clicking its associated file, e.g. double-clicking firefox.desktop runs Firefox. However, I can't find a way to do the same thing via terminal.

If I do gnome-open foo.desktop it simply opens foo.desktop as a text file. If I make it executable and then run it in bash it simply fails (which is expected, it's clearly not bash script).
EDIT: Doing exec /fullpath/foo.desktop gives me a Permission denied message, even if I change ownership to myself. If I make executable and do the same command, the terminal tab I'm using simply closes (I'm guessing it crashes). Finally, if I do sudo exec /fullpath/foo.desktop, I get an error reporting sudo: exec: command not found.

That's my question, how can I run a foo.desktop file from the terminal?

Solution 1

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.

Solution 2

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).

Solution 3

The answer should be

xdg-open program_name.desktop

But due to a bug (here upstream, closed on 2020-12-09) this no longer works.

Solution 4

While OP was not asking about KDE, for anyone that is running KDE the following command can be used:

kioclient exec <path-to-desktop-file>

On Fedora, this is included in the kde-runtime rpm.

Solution 5

The bug is still present since 2006. It is in fact depending on how gvfs-open (called by xdg-open) works.

Still, I managed a quick workaround (stealing inspiration from the nautilus source code). It is a bit convoluted, but works flawlessly on Ubuntu 12.10, adding a meaningful icon (no more ?) on the Unity launcher.

First, I wrote a python script using Gio and placed saved it as ~/bin/run-desktop :

#!/usr/bin/python

from gi.repository import Gio
import sys 

def main(myname, desktop, *uris):
    launcher = Gio.DesktopAppInfo.new_from_filename(desktop)
    launcher.launch_uris(uris, None)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main(*sys.argv)

The script needs to have the executable permission, so I ran this in a terminal:

chmod +x ~/bin/run-desktop

Then I created the relative .desktop entry on ~/.local/share/applications/run-desktop.desktop:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=run-desktop
Exec=run-desktop %U
MimeType=application/x-desktop
Terminal=false
Type=Application

Finally, I associated the entry as the default handler in ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list under the [Default Applications] section as :

[Default Applications]
....
application/x-desktop=run-desktop.desktop

Now:

• xdg-open something.desktop works as expected
• #!/usr/bin/xdg-open hashbang on top of an executable desktop entry works too

It will be useless work when gvfs-open will solve the bug, but in the meantime...

View more solutions

Comments

[Admin]

NB: The reason your exec failed is because exec replaces your currently running process with the process you specify, so what you did was try to replace your shell with running the desktop as a compiled binary. The reason you couldn't sudo exec is because it's a shell builtin and not a binary command.

[Admin]

Interesting, I was wondering why it caused the tab to close.

[Admin]

Related: Hashbang for Gnome .desktop files

[Admin]

I see, they end up parsing the .desktop file. Thank you anyway for the link.

[Malabarba]

This gives the best result so far, but it produces undesirable behavior sometimes. It happens whenever the "Exec=" line has an argument like %u or %i. Bash tries to pass that string as a regular argument. For instance, doing grep '^Exec' firefox.desktop | sed 's/^Exec=//' opens Firefox with a tab that loads www.%u.com.

[Malabarba]

For the moment I've added a second sed to remove any arguments. But I think there might be a more "natural" way to run it.

[Richard Holloway]

On GNOME you can use gnome-open which in turn uses xdg-open which has the bug.

[Malabarba]

Damn =/. Guess that solves it.

[Hamish Downer]

I've updated my answer with the extra sed - I forgot the desktop files could have arguments.

[enzotib]

Not what I would to hear, anyway thanks for the info

[enzotib]

Thank you, interesting. As "standard" I mean something provided by the DE and conforming to freedesktop.org.

[Drew]

WoW this is still a bug, lots of progress in xdg. exo-open is listed as workaround and it opens gedit too. :(

[pabst]

I know this is more appropriately a comment to Hamish's answer, but I'm a new user and not allowed to comment. Oh well!

[daisy]

You should add a "tail -1" to the pipe after "grep" , since "Exec=" can be appear multiple time , and after that , only the last appearance should be executed ..

[Hamish Downer]

@warl0ck: thanks for that - I've updated the answer with your suggestion.

[Flimm]

If you have the reputation, the most appropriate action would be to edit that answer, actually.

[Flimm]

Strike that, anyone can suggest edits, even users who haven't logged in! It's no biggie any way.

[Bruno Pereira]

This is an answer by itself, its fine.

[sdaau]

Thanks for the code - I'm on Lucid, and I simply saved this as /usr/bin/xdg-openpy, and gave it a chmod +x - and used launcher.launch([],context) instead of ...None,context) (because of "TypeError: argument 1: Must be sequence, not NoneType"). Now xdg-openpy app.desktop works from command line (and all as normal when double-clicking app.desktop), and it can remind me if I try to call in terminal xdg-open and press tab. Cheers!

[MestreLion]

+1. This is the only answer that does not require manually parsing the .desktop file, so it's the most sane (and safe) approach. Also uses modern gi.repository instead of the deprecated pygtk, so great! :)

[MestreLion]

@RichardHolloway: gnome-opendoes not call xdg-open, it's the other way around! So the issue lies in gvfs-open (the successor or gnome-open)

[MestreLion]

"no longer works"? It never did! xdg-open works by mimetype association, and .desktop files are associated with text editors, since they are a subclass of text

[MestreLion]

you can use "${@:1}" instead of shift, but that requires bash instead of sh in your #! shebang. IMHO your original shift approach is simpler and better

[Ingo Leonhardt]

In fact, this is a question concerning Carlo Pellegrini's answer. I'm a newby, please correct me if there was a better way to place it. The script works really fine, but the icon I get on the Unity launcher is not the icon defined in the .desktop file but the the default icon of the 'Exec'ed command. Any ideas about that?

[Lucio]

It doesn't show the icon of the application. Is this an expected behaviour or I should have something wrong in some file?

[Albert]

This didn't worked for me. It seems any paths are double quoted. The script by Carlo worked.

[jmtd]

Upvote for awk rather than a chain of greps and seds.

[Shirish Herwade]

awesome answer... worked for me

[Sam Watkins]

this is so stupid (that there is no sensible way to run a Desktop file from the terminal)

[Sam Watkins]

only good answer

[jarno]

Yes, just tested it in Ubuntu Studio 14.04. BTW. xdg-open and gvfs-open work there, too.

[basic6]

Upvoted because it works. No need to be running KDE at all, as long as you have this program installed.

[Admin]

This is the way, works in debian too.

[Croad Langshan]

gtk-launch firefox.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/ launches firefox viewing the directory ~/.local/share/applications/ for me. Seems if you were correct, firefox should not have been passed the directory of the .desktop file as an argument. In fact the directory passed to gtk-launch is not supposed to be used to locate the dir containing the .desktop file (and is not, in fact)

[Noitidart]

This bug is still there huh?

[Noitidart]

@IngoLeonhardt did you ever find a fix to that? I'm also trying to get the icon to be that of the .desktop file.

[Noitidart]

I did as you said I created the shell. and in my desktop file i added the shebang at top. But its not opening with the icon i set on the .desktop file :( I can share a screencast of my situation if you are available :)

[Ingo Leonhardt]

@noitidart unfortunately not, I've learned to live with it and haven't made any more efforts

[Noitidart]

Thanks @IngoLeonhardt for the reply! I'm actually finding lots of documentation on Gio and it has a lot of stuff mentioning icon (such as gdk_app_launch_context_set_icon_name) I think this is very possible! Did you explore the Gio docs? I'm reading code here: github.com/mathitme/nautilus/blob/…

[Ingo Leonhardt]

@noitidart my concern was starting things like specially parametrized xterms with a different icons to be able to distinguish one form another. So I haven't looked at C code. Nevertheless if you find something I would be glad if you let me know

[Noitidart]

Will definitely keep you updated @IngoLeonhardt :) I badly need the custom icon solution :)

[Noitidart]

Hey @IngoLeonhardt I figured out the c code to do this and it does launch with the custom icon! This is firefox js-ctypes code. To run it you can follow this youtube vid: youtube.com/watch?v=Rzgf7-I5QPg are you sure the icon of the .desktop file was not used?

[Noitidart]

@IngoLeonhardt I tested launching .desktop file on Ubuntu 14.04 and it launched and the custom icon of the .desktop took everywhere. But on Mint Cinnamon 17.1 the .desktop file if double clicked or if launched with Gio it doesn't take the icon of the .desktop. I'm thinking of looking into using gdk_app_launch_context_set_icon_name with Gio launch_uris, maybe it will make it take the icon, any idea?

[Ingo Leonhardt]

@Noitidart not at the moment (and not too much time either). But I've updated my run-desktop to the current version of this answer and still gnome-terminal is launched with it's default icon, not the one form the .desktop (Ubuntu 14.04 too)

[Ingo Leonhardt]

@Noitidart write the last answer led mo to do some google and I found that. Haven't checked it out, but maybe it helps

[Noitidart]

xseticon looks interesting it must be a custom function which sets _NET_WM_ICON

[Noitidart]

@IngoLeonhardt yep XChangeProperty is how they do it i downloaded that file: gist.github.com/Noitidart/64ad2edbda32627b684f

[Jonathan]

Works in 15 as well

[A.B.]

But the awk command is nice. Therefore a +1

[A.B.]

Nice, awk and Serg =)

[A.B.]

And sometimes, there is a TryExec, maybe you should check your 2nd command =)

[Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy]

@A.B. Hehe, awk is my weapon of choice when it comes to text processing. Besides, it's syntax is close to C. Oh, and already added TryExec part ^_^

[A.B.]

You have my +1 =)

[A.B.]

But what's about %f, %u, %U or something like this behind the command?

[Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy]

@A.B. that will be treated as part of a field, because = is the separator. So, for instance if we have Exec=firefox %u, then $1 is Exec , separator is = and $2 is firefox %u

[A.B.]

Ah sorry, my mistake :\

[Kwaadpepper]

Is there a way to have stdout of this ? I have compiled clementine player, which has a bug that occurs only launching through .desktop file (with plasma-shell). And i can't figure out, how to have output log log anywere.

[Raman]

@Kwaadpepper you could use your .desktop file to launch a shell script, which internally runs your command and redirects output to a file.

[Alicia]

Yay! An answer that works!

[Axel Beckert]

IMHO this is exactly the right answer: One tool, a single call with only the file as parameter. That's what I was looking for, too, to test hand-written .desktop files. And it can create .desktop files, too, yay! :-)

[Stuart Axon]

Perfect! If you add a .desktop file that uses dex gist.github.com/stuaxo/4169fc1342c496b7c8f7999188f2f242 to /usr/share/applications/ you will be able to launch desktop files in the filemanager without them opening in gedit by default too.

[Samuel]

This gave me problems with vlc.desktop, it had an option in the form of --started-from-file. I added another pipe to strip that: sed 's/-.*//g'... I barely know how to use sed, so I don't know if this is without problems.

[king_julien]

Using Debian with xfce. Works great!

[Victor]

Works for me on Arch Linux, but maybe it's an Ubuntu-specific bug.

[Boris Churzin]

Upvote, although it doesn't work (or better put - works too much) if you have ultiple Exec= lines :/

[gerardw]

Works for me in Ubuntu 16.04

[nhed]

hackish hack is hacky - need solution that causes the desktop to run it

[wisbucky]

Doesn't work for me in Ubuntu 16.04. Just opens the .desktop file in gedit.

[MountainX]

This does NOT work for me in Arch Linux at this time. xdg-open program_name.desktop opens the desktop file in a text edtor.

[MountainX]

This DOES work for me in Arch Linux also. None of the other answers were satisfactory, but this one is good. :-) It works even though I am running KDE.

[MountainX]

I do not find kioclient in any package of KDE for Arch Linux at this time. However, gtk-launch works under KDE for me.

[Joseph Garvin]

No version of this works for me on Ubuntu 18.10. Everytime it complains the application doesn't exist, whether I'm in the folder with the desktop file or not, whether I include the .desktop extension or not, and whether I separately name the directory or not.

[Joseph Garvin]

What is a URI in this context? I have a desktop file in an arbitrary folder. How the heck do I just run gtk-launch on it without having to wrap it in some other script? This is maddening.

[doug]

@ Joseph, I didn't add that part about providing a path, some one else did and probably is wrong. The .desktop needed to be in an applications folder as noted. (/usr/share/applications, /usr/local/share/applications or ~/.local/share/applications

[Tyler Collier]

Works for me in Ubuntu 14.04

[MarSoft]

This awk solution will not properly work if the command has double-escaped whitespaces or backslashes. It breaks on this: Exec=env WINEPREFIX="/path/to/.wine" wine c:\\\\windows\\\\command\\\\start.exe /Unix /path/to/.wine/dosdevices/c:/users/Public/Рабочий\\ стол/appname.lnk And dex solution works fine.

[tatsu]

same ubuntu 18.10 still opens gedit

[tatsu]

well that's utterly pointless. the only real point to would be to launch user-made .desktop launchers. if your app is in /usr/local/share/applications then you can just type the name of the app in the terminal.

[tatsu]

@JosephGarvin Okay I figured it out, it's gtk-launch MYCUSTOMAPP.desktop without the path. works on ubuntu 18.10

[itmuckel]

Works for me in 18.04 using Xubuntu. According to the help output of xdg-open and xdg-mime it shouldn't.

[Bob C]

This answer fails when the exec string ended in a double quote mark. It removed the last one but left the first one. For example: Exec=su-to-root -c "/usr/local/bin/ddm-mx -i nvidia" resulted in: su-to-root -c "/usr/local/bin/ddm-mx -i nvidia.

[jarno]

The files could be even in any data dir specified in specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/…

[kokbira]

It solves that issue for Fedora 30 too

[ricab]

That's it! Too much scrolling for the right answer...

[FallenWarrior]

Thank you for this. I was looking for a way to bypass this issue, while still making use of the .desktop files (for things like %U handling), and gtk-launch worked perfectly. I did download and install the patched version of Nautilus from the MR linked there, but it's great to have a solution that works without downgrading a core system (in terms of GNOME) application.

[Penghe Geng]

Works on 20.04.

[knezi]

@BobC yep, just change the two last seds to: sed 's/^"\(.*\)"$/\1/g'

[geekley]

This doesn't seem to work for files in ~/.local/share/applications/.

[geekley]

kioclient5 exec ~/.local/share/applications/myprogram.desktop worked for me on Kubuntu 20.04

[geekley]

Ah! kioclient5 exec ~/.local/share/applications/myprogram.desktop worked for me on Kubuntu 20.04. See answer below if you're on KDE.

[chenchuk]

The only one that worked for me so far. Thanks.

[shadowtalker]

Can exo-open be installed as a standalone package on Ubuntu without pulling in all of XFCE? I ask because in Opensuse exo-tools is a standalone package, with only minimal dependencies on XFCE (I think just one core library).

[Gabriel Staples]

I like your "Deprecated shell tools answer", which, albeit imperfect for all cases, works for most desktop files. So, I've upvoted your answer and put that script into my own summary answer too.

[Zanna]

Does this actually work? I don't think .desktop files have interpreter directives, so, like, won't the shell just unsuccessfully try to execute the file?

[thiagowfx]

$ dex chromium.desktop yields: File does not exist: /home/$USER/chromium.desktop. This solution isn't very portable, you're otherwise forced to use $ dex /usr/share/applications/chromium.desktop. gtk-launch works without the full path.

[RatajS]

@geekley It worked in KDE Neon 5.22.4 (Ubuntu 20.04) as well.

[Alexei Martianov]

For those who found that answer by googling and wanted to start desktop file, for gtk-launch the file has to be located in certain folders, see unix.stackexchange.com/questions/393079/…

[Ivan Marjanovic]

No, this is not working

[Aron Cederholm]

@MountainX, it is located in package kde-cli-tools