Dash: Alt-F2 "nautilus ~/" errors to "Could not find '/~'"

Thinking about it, that can be a nice bitesize :)

The problem here is that GLib.Process.spawn_async automatically prepends the current working directory to any args string specified which begins with '~'. I have tried all possible solutions with the below tiny vala app and have failed.

using GLib.Process;

static void main()
{
    Process.spawn_async(null, {"nautilus", "~"}, null, SpawnFlags.SEARCH_PATH, null, null);
}

We could manually check before the call to spawn_async and replace all args strings beginning with ~, with the home directory itself. This will be more of a workaround than a fix. No SpawnFlags are there to avoid GLib from the substitution, so this seems to be the only solution.

I won't be fixing this one, since the fix as specified in comment #2 may produce unexpected results. Hence, I am un-assigning myself.

The problem is that nautilus tries to open a file name '~' in the current working directory. This can be reproduced in the shell by running

nautilus '~'

I can see these options to solve this bug:
1. Call bash when executing commands. This implies that any bash substitution variable would occur. For instance, pressing Alt+F2 and typing "nautilus $HOME" would open the home directory.

2. Substitute the tilde character with the home directory. I find this dangerous, since we could make a wrong assumption of what the user wanted. We could think of ways to restrict tilde substitution, for instance, only substitute tilde when: 1) tilde is the first character; 2) the file should exist on system.

I would like to hear more opinions!

Ian L.

Here is a patch which fixes this bug by executing "bash -c <command>"

Hey Ian,

unfortunately your current patch is just a workaround and is breaking a lot of cases where bamf tries to match the application to a desktop file.
What we really need is a solution where ~ is interpreted in the runner application to be changed by home, as well as ~user1, ~user2… and so on.

This bug was fixed in the package unity-place-applications - 0.2.44-0ubuntu1

---------------
unity-place-applications (0.2.44-0ubuntu1) natty; urgency=low

  * New upstream release.
    - unity-applications-daemon crash when Software Center index is corrupted
      (LP: #620294)
    - Dash: Alt-F2 "nautilus ~/" errors to "Could not find '/~'" (LP: #734762)
    - unity-applications-daemon crash in unity_package_searcher_search()
      (LP: #739698)
    - unity-applications-daemon crash because of invalid docid 0 (LP: #744261)
    - Gnome-terminal doesn't start in user home directory when started from
      alt+F2 (LP: #736471)
 -- Didier Roche <email address hidden> Thu, 31 Mar 2011 15:09:07 +0200