gio.app_info

Information about an installed application and methods to launch it (with file arguments).

[gio.app_info.AppInfo] and [gio.app_launch_context.AppLaunchContext] are used for describing and launching applications installed on the system.

As of GLib 2.20, URIs will always be converted to POSIX paths (using [gio.file.File.getPath]) when using [gio.app_info.AppInfo.launch] even if the application requested an URI and not a POSIX path. For example for a desktop-file based application with Exec key totem U` and a single URI, sftp://foo/file.avi, then /home/user/.gvfs/sftp on foo/file.avi will be passed. This will only work if a set of suitable GIO extensions (such as GVfs 2.26 compiled with FUSE support), is available and operational; if this is not the case, the URI will be passed unmodified to the application. Some URIs, such as mailto:, of course cannot be mapped to a POSIX path (in GVfs there's no FUSE mount for it); such URIs will be passed unmodified to the application. Specifically for GVfs 2.26 and later, the POSIX URI will be mapped back to the GIO URI in the [gio.file.File] constructors (since GVfs implements the GVfs extension point). As such, if the application needs to examine the URI, it needs to use [gio.file.File.getUri] or similar on [gio.file.File]. In other words, an application cannot assume that the URI passed to e.g. [gio.file.File.newForCommandlineArg] is equal to the result of [gio.file.File.getUri]. The following snippet illustrates this:
CODEBLOCK0
This code will work when both cdda://sr0/Track 1.wav and /home/user/.gvfs/cdda on sr0/Track 1.wav` is passed to the application. It should be noted that it's generally not safe for applications to rely on the format of a particular URIs. Different launcher applications (e.g. file managers) may have different ideas of what a given URI means.