Panel can't do shell expansion?

[brettholcomb at charter.net]

Excellent explanation.  Now I understand.
> 
> From: Jaap Karssenberg <j.g.karssenberg at student.utwente.nl>
> Date: 2005/02/15 Tue PM 06:32:14 GMT
> To: XFCE general discussion list <xfce at xfce.org>
> Subject: Re: Panel can't do shell expansion?
> 
> David Olbersen wrote  on 02/15/2005 06:27 PM:
> > Am I alone in the expectation that what I type in the Command field of a 
> > launcher should work as though it were a shell command?
> 
> Well, yes, I hope so.
> Almost any program I know of that allows you to configure a command 
> string just passes it to execvp() which does little more than searching 
> $PATH. There is a good reason for that; shell parsers are quite 
> complicated and it would be overhead to have a shell interpreter 
> embedded in your program just so a user can have shell expansion.
> This is the reason that the "#!" for shell scripts was invented. Shell 
> scripts allow you to have a shell expansions, redirections etc. etc. and 
> can be called from your execvp() as a command. In fact even if your file 
> isn't executable execvp() will still try to run it as a shell script.
> 
> So your options are either inlining a "sh -c", as other posters 
> suggested, or make a shell script containing the expansion logic.
> As a bonus you are allowed to choose for yourself which shell- or 
> script-interpreter you use.
> 
> Note that the "exec" command in script languages like bash or perl uses 
> the execvp() system call internally.
> 
> -- 
>     )   (     Jaap Karssenberg || Pardus [Larus]                | |0| |
>     :   :     http://pardus-larus.student.utwente.nl/~pardus    | | |0|
>   )  \ /  (                                                     |0|0|0|
>   ",.*'*.,"   Proud owner of "Perl6 Essentials" 1st edition :)  wannabe
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