Ubuntu

Menu Entry of 'Application in a terminal' does nothing

Asked by John Rose

I setup the command shown below as a main menu entry type of 'Application in Terminal'. This is to create a backup file of my Evolutuion contacts & mail boxes.

tar -cvzf ~/Internet/MailAndContactsBackup.tar.gz .evolution .gconf/apps/evolution .gnome2_private/Evolution

It appears to do nothing when invoked from the main menu. When the command is run from within a Terminal, it creates the MailAndContactsBackup.tar.gz file in ~/Internet.

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This question was originally filed as bug #179703.

Revision history for this message
Nathan Handler (nhandler) said : 		#1

Thank you for taking the time to report this issue and helping to make Ubuntu better. Examining the information you have given us, this does not appear to be a bug report so we are closing it and converting it to a question in the support tracker. We appreciate the difficulties you are facing, but it would make more sense to raise problems you are having in the support tracker at [WWW] https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu if you are uncertain if they are bugs. For help on reporting bugs, see [WWW] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs .

Revision history for this message
Nathan Handler (nhandler) said : 		#2

John, the issue you are experiencing is due to the fact that when you run a command from the Applications menu, it does not have the same PATH as when you run it from a terminal (where you have already cd'ed into your home directory). In order to get around this, you need to use absolute paths in your command instead of relative paths. Try using this command instead:

tar -cvzf /home/johnaaronrose/Internet/MailAndContactsBackup.tar.gz /home/johnaaronrose/.evolution /home/johnaaronrose/.gconf/apps/evolution /home/johnaaronrose/.gnome2_private/Evolution

That command assumes your home folder is /home/johnaaronrose. If it is not, be sure to substitute in the actual path to your home folder. This should allow you to run the script.

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