Starting a program from a command line versus clicking an icon.

[Max Okumoto]

walt wrote:
On Mon, 22 Aug 2005, Eduardo Tongson wrote:


On 8/22/05, walt <wa1ter at xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


xterm -bg `rlc` (gives a random-light-colored background)

This works great when I type the command from an xterm
window -- but it fails when I click on a gnome or xfce
icon containing the same command.


what happens when you quote it
"xterm -bg `rlc`"


Really strange behavior -- the xfce gui complains that the
second " can't be found.  No idea why.  I also tried several
combinations of single quotes and backslashes and nothing
worked.
In any case I followed Michael's suggestion and wrote a
shellscript which works the way I wanted.  (I notice that
xfce's version of xterm is actually a shellscript which
invokes xterm, and now I know why :o)
One posibility is that your window manager had the wrong
path.  Unix windowing system uses environ(7) to obtain the
path.   So depending on how your wondow manager is started
up, your path may not contain the directory you put your
rlc program.  In many cases, you need to restart the window
manager when you update your PATH enviornment variable.
					Max