Commandline scripting KDE

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?