On Tue, 2012-09-04 at 22:05 -0400, Doug wrote: > Right-clicking on the Pinball icon on the screen > produces > a box of Desktop Icon Settings, and under "Preview" is listed this, just > as I show it: > > > [Desktop Entry] > Name=Pinball > Exec=env > WINEPREFIX="/home/doug/wine"wine C: > \\\\windows\\\\command\\\\start.exe > /Unix > /home/doug.wine/dosdevices/c:/users/do > ug/Start\\ > Menu/Programs/Games/Pinball.lnk > Type=Application > StartupNotify=true > Path=/home/doug/.wine/dosdevices/c:/Pro > gram Files/Microsoft Games/Pinball > Icon=E4EC_pinball.0 > That looks like a KDEism - I'm running XFCE, which is closer to Gnome in the way it defines application launcher icons, etc. > I'm afraid I am not familiar with the conventions used > here-- quadruple backslashes, etc. > It's really a good idea to get somewhat familiar with shell scripting because it makes customising the system to suit yourself easier and may well be a lifesaver if anything breaks badly. If you consider yourself a Windows power user, i.e. you can write .BAT files, diddle with the directory, etc, I'd recommend getting a copy of 'Linux in a nutshell' - its fairly terse because it assumes familiarity with at least one other OS. Otherwise something like "Linux for Dummys" might be better despite the rather off-putting name because the "...Dummys" books do assume little prior knowledge. In this case you're dealing with 'escaped' characters: the '\' character affects the meaning of the following character, so \b represents a backspace and \n a newline. If you want a literal backslash you write '\\' though its worth knowing that: (1) Wine accepts either '\' or '/' within filename arguments on its filename and will replace '/' with '\' before passing the filename to the app. (2) If the filename is enclosed in quotes then you don't need to escape backslashes: in the following the two commands are treated as identical: wine C:\\\\windows\\command\\start.exe wine "C:\\windows\command\start.exe" Martin