[PLUG] Find files by metadata

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Thu Nov 24 16:44:20 UTC 2011


On Wed, 23 Nov 2011 22:56:32 -0800
Dale Snell <ddsnell at frontier.com> dijo:

>My understanding is that all of these files have names of the form
>"<foobar>.desktop" or "<barfoo>.directory".  There may be some
>named "<korflplatz>.kdelnk", but the .kdelnk suffix is deprecated.
>So far as I know, they shouldn't be named any other way.
>
>All of the .desktop files that I've looked at have "[Desktop
>Entry]" as the first line.  The file command tells me that they
>are UTF-8 Unicode English text.
>
>The file
>
><http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/index.html>
>
>is the standard for this type of file.

Thanks for the link.

My current task is to edit the application menu in XFCE, which does not
come with a menu editor like Gnome's Alacarte. (Actually, I understand
that Alacarte will no longer run if you have Gnome 3.x.) I found
LXMenuEditor (from LXDE), but it is pretty minimal. I'm finding it
easier to do things by editing the configuration files manually, which
are all just text files. The hard part is figuring out the syntax
required in the text files and how the system works.

One problem is that I find desktop files in /usr/share/applications and
also in ~/.local/share/applications, and sometimes in other places as
well. Frequently there are duplications, and sometimes the app shows up
in various places in the menus and sometimes not at all, and without
regard to how many copies of the desktop file there are. There must be a
system to this mess, and it would be easier to figure it out if I could
find all the desktop files in one list, complete with the folder where
it is located.

I understand that the desktop files are supposed to end in .desktop,
but I have lots that do not. Yet, if I delete the file, the menu entry
disappears, so the file must be a desktop entry. And when I open the
file in Gedit the name of the file in the Gedit tab is not the same as
the name in the file browser.

Application menu handling in Linux is a gawdawful mess.



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