This week's book giveaway is in the General Computing forum. We're giving away four copies of Arduino in Action and have Martin Evans, Joshua Noble, and Jordan Hochenbaum on-line! See this thread for details.
I would like to add an action to my java application that takes a user to a specific directory when they click on the toolbar icon. For users using Windows, this is easy since I can just call explorer.exe from the command line. However, I don't know the equivalent in Mac OS or Linux. Can anyone help with this? I think in mac, I can use /usr/bin/open?
if (System.getProperty("os.name").beginsWith("Windows")) { Runtime.getRuntime().exec("explorer.exe " + path); } else if (System.getProperty("os.name").indexOf("Linux")!=-1) { // What goes here? } else if (System.getProperty("os.name").beginsWith("Mac")) Runtime.getRuntime().exec("usr/bin/open" + path); // is this right? ...
Your code for the Mac seems to be right for OS X - aside from missing a space after the /usr/bin/open. I don't know if it would work for older systems, but that's probably not a small number of users anyway.
Another option is if you're using JDK 6, you can use java.awt.Desktop to open() the directory with simple platform-independent code. That's nice, but only works if you can reasonably expect your users to have JRE 6 installed. For some applications that may be a perfectly reasonable expectation, but for others, not.
The more save command for Windows platforms is the "start" command. That also not only works for folders, but also for all kinds of files.
The soul is dyed the color of its thoughts. Think only on those things that are in line with your principles and can bear the light of day. The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you do is who you become. Your integrity is your destiny - it is the light that guides your way. - Heraclitus
This was a good idea, but I doubt it will work. I just tried it with the JDNC library, which is basically the same as java.awt.Desktop, and I got a error back "The given file is a directory".
Originally posted by Jim Yingst: Your code for the Mac seems to be right for OS X - aside from missing a space after the /usr/bin/open. I don't know if it would work for older systems, but that's probably not a small number of users anyway.
Another option is if you're using JDK 6, you can use java.awt.Desktop to open() the directory with simple platform-independent code. That's nice, but only works if you can reasonably expect your users to have JRE 6 installed. For some applications that may be a perfectly reasonable expectation, but for others, not.
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