Question

I’m writing a GTK+ application. At the end of the program’s running, it opens the user selected directory. Currently, it is hard-coded to open nautilus:

g_spawn_sync(
    0,
    stringArray(
        "/usr/bin/nautilus",
        gtk_file_chooser_get_filename(GTK_FILE_CHOOSER(directoryChooser)),
        NULL
    ), 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0);
gtk_main_quit();

I want this to work on other desktop environments where nautilus isn’t necessarily installed or preferred. There are links to other programs in /etc/alternatives and links such as x-terminal-emulator and x-www-browser that are standardised.

Are there similar ways to get the preferred graphical file manager?

Answer 1

gnome-open will open a directory in the preferred file manager if you give it a directory name. It will also open up other preferred applications, such as a PDF viewer or broswer depending on what you pass it.

Another alternative is xdg-open, which does a similar thing.