Skip to content

Commandline scripting KDE

Saturday, 21 May 2005  |  krake

Last week we had our local Linux event of the year called Grazer LinuxTage which is part of an Austrian wide series of events called Linuxwochen.

This year I decided to do a talk about KDE and not about Qt programming as the years before.

Being asked to do a beginner level talk, I settled with an introduction on commandline scripting KDE, i.e. using KDE features through commandline applications.

The official webpage of the talk, including the slides, can be found here

I did a quick English translation: KPresenter file/HTML version

From the feedback I got I'd say that the audience was quite impressed by the size fo the feature set accessible through commandline clients :)

kstart, kdialog and dcop were the two most well known among the advanced users in the auditorium, however kde-config or kreadconfig/kwriteconfig were almost unknown. Which is a pity since those three are quite useful for sysadmin tasks.

While I am on the topic of sysadmin tasks: after the talk I was approached by a visitor who had questions regarding large scale user setups.

For example he asked what the best way would be to copy new icons to every user's desktops. I suggested to use kde--config to determine the user's desktop path in a script sourced from KDEPREFIX/env/ during KDE startup (or should I say kde-config --path exe | sed s#/bin#/env#g :))

Anyone know a more elegant solution, maybe some Kiosk trick?