Question

I have an application that launches a webpage in the ‘current’ browser when the user selects it. This part of my app works fine in the Windows version but I can’t figure out how to do this in Linux build.

Right now the Linux version is hardcoded for Firefox in a specific directory and runs a new instance of it each time and doesn’t show the URL that I pass in. I would like it to NOT launch a new version each time but just open a new page in the current open one if it is already running.

For windows I use:

ShellExecute(NULL,'open',filename,NULL,NULL,SW_SHOWNORMAL); 

For Linux I currently use:

pid_t pid; char *args[2];  char *prog=0; char firefox[]={'/usr/bin/firefox'};  if(strstri(filename,'.html'))     prog=firefox;  if(prog) {     args[0]=(char *)filename;     args[1]=0;     pid=fork();     if(!pid)         execvp(prog,args);  } 

Answer 1

If you’re writing this for modern distros, you can use xdg-open:

$ xdg-open http://google.com/ 

If you’re on an older version you’ll have to use a desktop-specific command like gnome-open or exo-open.