Hi, i don't know if this is exactly the same what you try, but for me the following does work: I created a script /tmp/script.sh with content: konqueror www.winehq.org Then a program test.c: #include <windows.h> int main() { execl("/bin/sh","sh","/tmp/script.sh",NULL); } After compiling it, and running it in wine, it seems to work just fine; konqueror is started and opens the website. Is your script very different from this simple app? (Note, as i said already, execl doesn't return, so no return value, i guess something similar can be done with _spawnvp