All standards compliant applications in Linux store a desktop schema in /usr/share/applications/. In my particular use case, I have a WnckWindow data structure and I can get a pid from that. Using this pid, I can extract the command line from the proc.
Unfortunately, it seems that the proc command line entry does not match the desktop schema launch parameters. For example, the ‘thunderbird’ application is launched via /usr/bin/thunderbird but this is just a shell script which activates the real executable: /usr/lib/thunderbird-8.0/thunderbird-bin.
The real executable cannot be launched directly as it is dependent on the library paths configured in the /usr/bin/thunderbird script. Does anyone have any advice on how to match process id numbers to the appropriate desktop schema without getting caught by the issue I’ve described?, Thanks.
Ok, well, it appears that there’s no nice way of solving this using the pid, however, it is relatively easy to match the Wnck windows class to application desktop schemas. The Wnck windows class needs to be preprocessed a little first to ensure that the filter works but it’s pretty trivial stuff. Once you’ve got a good set of target strings, eg ‘Thunderbird’ or ‘Google’ + ‘Chrome’, you can use the system application menu API to zero in on a likely candidate, for example, by using garcon on Xfce.