Re: downsides to replacing xfce4-terminal?

[John Crawley <john@bunsenlabs.org>]

On 08/01/2022 12:00, David Wright wrote:
> On Fri 07 Jan 2022 at 14:46:04 (-0500), Lee wrote:
> > right - another unknown.  There's a  /usr/bin/xfce4-terminal.wrapper
> > that starts off with
> > #! /usr/bin/perl -w
> > #
> > # Terminal.wrapper - Debian terminal wrapper script
> >
> > which I don't know who calls or even why it exists.
>
> You can read it: it appears to shuffle some of the arguments,
> like '-display' → '--default-display', and eliminate others,
> like '-fn'/'-fg'/'-bg'. Perhaps the options that the DE puts
> into the call don't match what the binary expects to be given,
> or it's pretending to be a different program.
>
> At the end, it execs a bare 'xfce4-terminal' with the new
> argument list, so I presume that would reconsult the $PATH.

A number of terminals have ".wrapper" scripts to make them match the specification of Debian's x-terminal-emulator. In particular -e <command line> often needs massaging to fit some terminal's own peculiarities.

~$ update-alternatives --list x-terminal-emulator
/usr/bin/lxterminal
/usr/bin/urxvt
/usr/bin/xfce4-terminal.wrapper

The wrappered version is set as the debian alternative.

--
John