How to create a desktop shortcut to a JAR file?
 

Hello.

I have installed Paros Web Proxy successfully. I can run the program by going to the command line and entering:

I though to create a shortcut I could right click the desktop and create a launcher. The launcher asked for a command in which I put:

The launcher does not work. I then tried to right click the paros.jar file and create a link. I dragged the link to the desktop. This did not work either.

I see the similarities to Vista, but since no version of Windows really tells you exactly what is happening when you create a shortcut, I have never thought much about them.

What is it I am missing?

Try creating a bash script to run the commands that launch your application and link to the script for your shortcut. By way of illustration, create a text file in your home directory called do_paros and put this text in it:

This will be your bash script. Make sure that the you start on the first line, first space with "#!/bin/bash". Now open a console and make do_paros executable by running:

$ chmod a+x do_paros

And test the script from the command line to make sure it opens your application by running:

$ ./do_paros

If that works OK, then close the console and try running the script by double clicking on the do_paros file and see if it launches the application. If that works, create a shorcut to do_paros on your desktop and it should work fine.

This did not work either, but the good news is that the error produced by this method is the same as the errors from the methods I tried earlier. Here is the error:

Exception in thread "main" java.io.FileNotFoundException: db/parosdb.data (No such file or directory)
at java.io.FileInputStream.open(Native Method)
at java.io.FileInputStream.<init>(FileInputStream.java:137)
at org.parosproxy.paros.model.FileCopier.copyLegacy(Unknown Source)
at org.parosproxy.paros.model.FileCopier.copy(Unknown Source)
at org.parosproxy.paros.model.Model.createAndOpenUntitledDb(Unknown Source)
at org.parosproxy.paros.model.Model.init(Unknown Source)
at org.parosproxy.paros.Paros.run(Unknown Source)
at org.parosproxy.paros.Paros.main(Unknown Source)

I think that because the shortcuts are not running in the paros folder, the paros program is looking for the file db/parosdb.data in the shortcuts directory rather than the paros directory.

I am not sure how to work around this though.

OK. I edited the shortcut file to read:

#!/bin/bash
cd /home/ubuntu/programs/paros
java -jar paros.jar

This worked. I have been using windows for a decade so Linux is taking some getting used to. Thanks for the help.

This is what made it work, because the "simple" shortcut you first created didn't specify the "working directory".
There might / should have been an option for you to do this ( there is in KDE ).
Now it's working, be happy.