(01-24-2016, 01:57 AM)Lynne link Wrote: [ -> ]Since having a sleep and a couple of cups of coffee, I've been able to really have a look at this exo-open Documents thingy and boy, am I not impressed!! It smacks too much of "1984" and all those "out there" who can hack your computer can see exactly what you have ... all the metadata that is there, from emails to documents to anything on your computer. While it looks great from a "personal" point of view that only you have access, who knows who else will have access - children, husband, wife, breakup of a relationship, lawyers, judges, etc...
... :o
I don't know what you stumbled upon and read, but whatever it was it wasn't about the "exo-open" command.
Sounds more like you stumbled on info about forensic data analysis tools that can be used to find things on hard drives, etc. That is a whole different ball of wax and has nothing to do with the "exo-open" command.
Have a read through manual page posted by
avj.
Basically, "exo-open" is used as a
generic replacement for specific commands to open specific programs. So, as per example being talked about here -- adding Documents, Music, etc. folders to the main menu -- if Jerry were to use the command for
thunar to open the Document folder (
thunar Documents) and you had decided to change your system to using the
nautilus file manager, the command would not work for you (if you had deleted the thunar program), or would have opened the folder in thunar (if you still had it installed) even though you prefer using
nautilus. So instead of using the specific command for the specific file manager
thunar to open Documents, the
exo-open command is used. It will first find out what is the preferred application on your system for opening files/folders, then execute that -- in your case,
nautilus.
Same basic idea applies to opening web links for another example. Some people may have deleted the default Firefox browser and instead use Chrome or some other browser, thus their preferred browser application is different than the initial default of
firefox. Any command they try to execute that specifies
firefox will fail because they don't have it installed anymore. But a command using
exo-open will check the "preferred applications" list for browsers and open the link with the browser shown there.