I am using Linux Mint.
I wrote a small program in C and want to drag and drop a file onto its desktop or caja icon.
When I drag a file over the icon of an installed application, that app icon highlights showing that it will launch, but my program's icon does not highlight. How do I enable the launch?
In windows all programs launch, even if they don't handle a dropped file.
The program "executable" permission is set, and double clicking the icon does launch it.
I am thinking that it is not something I do "in" the program code, but some configuration for the icon or Linux. The program code accepts command line arguments when run from a terminal. But dropping files on its icon does nothing at all except moves the files to the desktop piled on top of the program icon. Never even attempts to launch the program.
What am I missing?
Now I understand!
I must create a "launcher" for the program. This is done by right-clicking on the desktop blank area to get the context menu, and choose "Create Launcher...". Then fill in the fields, and especially the "Command:" field with a valid pathname (or just a name if the program is in a directory that is included in the PATH environment variable). AND include at the end of that command line %F to accept the file(s) to be dropped. Also give it a name and click OK.
If you leave off the %F and drop more than one file, each file will launch its own instance of the program. The %F causes all the files to be passed to one instance of the program. For example if you want to drop two files onto a compare program.
If it doesn't work, you can edit the command and other fields by right-clicking on its icon and choose Properties.
It has a generic springboard icon.
In a terminal, the ls command shows the launch file for "prog" (for example) as prog.desktop but on the desktop just prog. The launcher file can be moved or copied into a folder (other than desktop) and they work the same (although the icon is different).
Hope this helps others.
Related
I have written one very simple app in C. I know how to run it through Visual studio, but i want to start it from desktop with a double-click. If I double-click on a .exe file made in folder, it does not start. How can I do this?
If you do not wish to modify your code so that it will wait for user input before closing (and there are many reasons that might be inappropriate), you could create a batch file wrapper:
myprog.bat
myprog.exe
pause
Then either you can double click the batch file or create a shortcut to the batch file then edit the shortcut to set the path to the batch file and the path from which to run (so it can find the exe).
That pretty much emulates how Visual Studio runs your code without terminating the window.
Another method you might consider is a batch file such as:
runner.bat
%1
pause
Then you can drag-and-drop your executable onto the runner.bat icon to run it. The advantage being that you don't have to create a new batch file and/or shortcut for every new executable.
Really though this is not a C question, or even a programming question - it is most likely off topic. If your code is ever required to run to completion unattended in a batch file for example, you would not necessarily want to add any interactivity to the program itself.
Your problem is that double clicking on a console app will open a new console window, run the program and then close the window.
VS studio does a trick where it runs the app in a new console window but keeps it open till you press a key.
You can add that same thing yourself - put a getchar() call at the end
Or you can make a bat file to run the app as per Cliffords answer
1st open the code with visual studio code
Run or Build the program
then u will find an executable file where u have saved your code
Open that executable file
but you must have installed mingw installed in your environment
you must compile it first with mingw or like compiler. and start it with by code:
cmd> yourdirectory(e.g Desktop)/ gcc yourcodefile.c your question is available also internet => how-to-compile-c-program
I have made a c program with codeBlocks on windows 10, but the exe crashes as soon as I open it, actually it does not matter the program all exe produced by codeblocks won't run, maybe there are some problems with the settings? Cause if I run the program from inside codeBlocks it runs without problems, any suggestion?
You are compiling "command line programs", which don't open a window on their own. Since they apparently don't expect any user input they run to the end quite happily and quit.
If you want to run this type of programs, you need a shell, which provides a window.
This is a simple way to get one: Open a file explorer window and navigate to the directory containing your program. Click into the address bar so that it changes into a textual representation of the path. Replace all of it with the word cmd and press enter. Now the shell's window opens, commonly with white text on a black background. Enter the name of the program, and it will run.
There are many users struggling with UAC prompts opening in background instead of foreground. Well, I want to do exactly the opposite, ie having the UAC prompt flash on the taskbar and waiting for my attention instead of dimming my whole screen and messing my workflow.
Here's my setup: I'm working on a Win7 x64 machine, and I placed this link in my Startup folder:
C:\CLUs\chp.exe "apps.bat"
chp.exe is an utility that loads batch files without showing the command prompt.
apps.bat calls several unelevated programs (easier to manage apps in this way rather than putting a bunch of links in Startup). The last line of such bat is
elevate chp "elevapps.bat"
elevate.exe is an utility that, as the name says, elevates whatever is called with issuing an UAC prompt. And, clearly, elevapps.bat contains another bunch of programs that require admin rights to start properly.
Now, for a number of reasons I'd like the UAC prompt to start minimized/in background. Ie, once I've logged in Windows, all I want to see is the taskbar containing the flashing icon of the UAC, but no dimmed screen.
Is this possible with batch files? All I know is that UAC "smartly" detects whether it is stealing focus or not and (doesn't) show up accordingly. And clearly during the startup there's nothing to steal focus from, so looks like I'm having no luck. However it also seems that badly coded software (namely not assigning HWNDs somewhere, see here and here) precisely produces this effect. Is there a way to reproduce this "bug" (I'd call it a feature, in my case) with some code in a batch file? Also using a third party utility would be fine, however I'm not a programmer.
I solved the problem by using winapiexec.exe, an utility that allows (as per site) to run WinAPI functions through command line parameters.
winapiexec shell32.dll#ShellExecuteW NULL "runas" "chp" "elevapps.bat" NULL 7
For years now my Windows C tagging/scoping solution has almost worked. I can build the filelist, build the tags (via Exuberant Ctags) for vim/gvim navigation, build cscope.out, and tag around within gvim.exe windows I launch by clicking on C source files.
The final piece that eludes me is that I can't seem to get cscope in cmd.exe to launch my editor when I select an item. I made sure gvim.exe is in my Path environment variable. I made sure the CSCOPE_EDITOR environment variable is set (more on that below). But when I select a line item from within cscope the editor is not launched. Instead I get one of the two following failures:
If CSCOPE_EDITOR is either gvim.exe -f or "gvim.exe -f" then I see that printed at the top of the cmd.exe window followed by the line offset and the filename (e.g. "gvim.exe -f +72 myfile.c") and then it quickly returns to cscope without the editor ever popping.
If CSCOPE_EDITOR is gvim.exe (without the -f option) then a gvim.exe process is kicked off (I see it in Windows Task Manager under Processes) but it never comes to the foreground as an application. Furthermore, the cscope window in cmd.exe goes blank and is unresponsive until I manually kill the gvim.exe process that was spawned.
For reference:
cscope -V returns "cscope: version 15.8a" and was downloaded from this site: http://code.google.com/p/cscope-win32/
My version of gvim.exe is 7.3 which the latest available from http://www.vim.org/
Also, I have tagged this post with "C" because, while this is not a C language question, cscope and ctags are primarily used for C programming and thus I think the C tag is relevant. (Thought I'd point that out before someone comes along and removes the tag and says this isn't a C question, since C programmers are the most likely people to have the answer.)
With help from #mattn and #mMontu and a lot of trial-and-error and an ugly but simple hack I finally have this working. Here are the problems I encountered:
cscope-win32 does not handle spaces in the EDITOR or CSCOPE_EDITOR environment variables. I tried every space-escape trick I could think of (single-quotes, double-quotes, backslash escapes) and nothing worked.
When gvim.exe is successfully launched by cscope-win32, if that gvim.exe tries to add the same cscope.out database (via cs add cscope.out) the add command hangs. If the add is part of a vimrc file then the editor will hang during opening (with the gvim.exe and cscope.exe processes starting but the application window never appearing). If the add is done after the editor window opens then the window will hang. This appears related to multiple cscope-win32 processes being attempted in the same process tree, but I have no actual proof of that.
Here's my solution to the problem. Like I said, it is an ugly but simple hack.
Create a wrapper batch file. I named mine gvim_cscope.bat. Make sure it is in a directory that exists in your PATH environment variable. You can verify this in a cmd.exe shell by calling "where gvim_cscope.bat".
Edit the batch file and add your editor command but precede it with the windows start command. For example, my batch file contains the following:
start gvim.exe %*
Create/Update your CSCOPE_EDITOR environment variable to be "gvim_cscope.bat". In case you've never modified a Windows environment variable before, you can get to them (on Windows 7 anyway) via Start -> right-click Computer -> Properties -> Advanced System Settings -> Environment Variables.
That's all I needed to get things working. Open a new cmd.exe window (so the updated environment variable is pulled in) and open cscope.exe and everything works. I am able to pop multiple gvim.exe windows from within cscope.exe, each with its own connection to the cscope.out database. The first problem is avoided by using the wrapper batch file (no more spaces in the command) and the second problem is avoided by using the windows start command so that gvim.exe is started as a separate process.
Thanks for the help #mattn and #mMontu. So nice to have things working right!
In Windows 7, some programs allow the user to launch multiple instances by middle clicking / shift+clicking on the taskbar item (ex: Paint, Notepad, Visual Studio...)
However, none of the applications I create exhibit this behavior. The middle click function will make the button glow, but fail to open another instance unless I pin the program to the taskbar first (which is not required for Paint/Notepad/etc to still be able to open new instances)
What is the secret to allowing a WPF application to properly create new instances like the above listed programs?
I've tried searching, but I have only come up with jumplist/tasks or single-instance program results.
The secret here is called shortcut. To get this behavior, you have to create a shortcut to your program, to the start menu, the desktop or the taskbar. When a shortcut is present, Windows finds it from the running program, even if it has been started by a totally different way (command line, explorer, etc...) and middle clicking or shift-clicking on the open program icon in the taskbar simply executes the shortcut.
This is easily verifiable: remove the shortcut for Notepad from the start menu and you won't be able to middle click it anymore! Change the shortcut by adding an argument to it (a text file path) and the file will be opened in notepad by shift-clicking on the taskbar icon.