SHGetKnownFolderPath equivalent API in Linux

Question

I\'m porting some functionality from windows to linux and I\'m finding it harder to match the functionality of SHGetKnownFolderPath in linux. Actually there is an API in gli

Answer 1

The home directory you can retrieve from the environment variable named HOME. This you can fetch using getenv(). Inside your home directory, there are not so many standardized directories. You have Desktop used by Gnome, KDE and friends for what you have on your desktop. Different apps and applications ends up in directories prefixed with a single ., making default listing of directory content hide them in most applications, example .ssh and .mc .

Answer 2

The status of the Linux desktop is a sad mess, especially for this kind of stuff. There are some FreeDesktop standards, but nothing close to Windows Shell APIs for both consistency and commitment to backwards compatibility.

That being said, in my experience the safest thing to do is relying on utilities from XDG, in particular xdg-user-dir in your case (xdg utils can come in handy in other cases); nowadays they are almost universally installed, and they usually do the "right" thing. Also, many packages rely on them, so it's likely that any DE tests the integration at least on them (IOW: if someone writes configuration that breaks even xdg utils it's likely that they'll fix it; if it's out of spec garbage that happens to work with xdg utils they may not notice).

Please don't try to be too clever with this kind of stuff. Firefox tries to be clever with file associations on Linux and it's 10 years that clicking "open folder" in it opens random applications (for the record, on my box it's extremely fond of opening Gwenview; in the past it liked more FileLight).