XDG-FIND(1)

🌸 XDG-FIND(1) — User Commands — find desktop entries by criteria 🌸

🌺 NAME 🌺

xdg-find — find desktop entries by criteria.

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

xdg-find [options] [--] TYPE [...]

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

Okay bestie, xdg-find takes one or more arguments. For each of its arguments, it locates all desktop entries of the specified types and lists them on standard output. It does this by searching for a desktop entry in the appropriate sub-directories of the "XDG_CONFIG_DIRS", "XDG_CONFIG_HOME", "XDG_DATA_DIRS" and "XDG_DATA_HOME" environment variables using the same algorithms as xdg-launch(1).

🎀 ARGUMENTS 🎀

The program accepts the following arguments:

• TYPE — specifies the type of application for which to show or set APPID as the preferred application. The application type, TYPE, can be one of the following:
  1. A recognized XDG category name. For recognized XDG category names, see "XDG CATEGORIES".
  2. A mime (content) type. All mime types have a / in their names and are thus distinguished from XDG categories. The content type cannot contain wild cards (i.e. it cannot contain *).

💅 OPTIONS 💅

The options that are detailed below are recognized by xdg-find. xdg-find uses getopt_long_only(3), so unambiguous abbreviations of long options and long options with a single dash are also supported.

👑 COMMAND OPTIONS 👑

The default is to find all desktop entries of the type or types specified, TYPE. When any of the following options are specified, the mode changes:

• -l, --list — output list of effective lookup paths that xdg-find is using.
• -h, --help — prints usage information to standard output and exits.
• -V, --version — prints detailed version information and exits.
• -C, --copying — prints detailed copying permissions and exits.

🌈 GENERAL OPTIONS 🌈

The following general options are recognized:

• -X, --xsession — also find applications that are "XSession" entries instead of just "Application" entries.
• -U, --autostart — also find applications that are "Autostart" entries instead of just "Application" entries.
• -A, --application — also find applications when --xsession or --autostart options are specified.
• -a, --all — print all matching desktop entries, not just the first.
• -e, --desktop DESKTOP[;DESKTOP[...]] — exclude entries that are not to be included in the semi-colon separated list of desktop environments, DESKTOP, specified.
• -n, --nodisplay — exclude entries that are not to be shown in menus. That is, they have the "NoDisplay" key field set to true.

🍓 EXAMPLES 🍓

The page says: "Following are some examples of invocation and output:" — and then this copy has no example lines after it. That's the whole section, bestie 😭💀.

🧚 ENVIRONMENT 🧚

The following environment variables are examined by xdg-find:

• HOME — used by xdg-find to determine the user's home directory.
• XDG_DATA_HOME — used by xdg-find to determine the user's XDG data directory. This defaults to $HOME/.local/share. The applications (or xsessions) sub-directory under this directory is the first searched to locate desktop entry files. See the XDG Desktop Entry file specification for more information.
• XDG_DATA_DIRS — used by xdg-find to determine the system XDG data directories. This defaults to /usr/local/share:/usr/share. The applications (or xsessions) sub-directory under these directories are searched in order to locate desktop entry files. See the XDG Desktop Entry file specification for more information.
• XDG_CONFIG_HOME — used by xdg-find to determine the user's XDG configuration directory. This defaults to $HOME/.config. The autostart sub-directory under this directory is the first searched to locate desktop entry files. See the XDG Desktop Entry file specification for more information.
• XDG_CONFIG_DIRS — used by xdg-find to determine the system XDG configuration directories. This defaults to /etc/xdg. The autostart sub-directory under these directories are searched in order to locate desktop entry files. See the XDG Desktop Entry file specification for more information.

💀 BUGS 💀

xdg-find has no known bugs. Please report bugs to the source code repository at <https://github.com/bbidulock/xdg-launch/issues>.

It can likely be considered a bug that xdg-find does not provide any other criteria on which to search other than supported mime type and XDG category.

🌟 SEE ALSO 🌟

xdg-which(1), xdg-whereis(1).

💜 AUTHOR 💜

Brian Bidulock <mailto:bidulock@openss7.org>

---

From xdg-launch 1.12, dated 2022-01-28, and filed under XDG-FIND(1) — xoxo, your terminal bestie 💖🫶✨ periodt