I installed the latest Mozilla and when I went to create an icon in the k-Menu (Kde 3.14) I noticed the old Mozilla 1.4 lauched via running "mozilla %u". I wondered what this argument meant. I didn't add it to my Mozilla 1.6 and it ran fine. I also took it off the Mozilla 1.4 and it ran just the same.....so what gives? What does the little %u acutally do?

I then started digging through the menu items and noticed a few other apps using it....like Xmms (which runs just the same via Xmms or Xmms %U) . I've asked on many irc chans and googled as well.

It's not really important but I like learning whats going on underneath those pretty icons.

It's for drag&drop support in GNOME, maybe KDE as well. Try dragging an mp3 file to the XMMS icon and it should open in XMMS.

in kde it tells kde to pass the url instead of as a filepath when encountering a url link in an application. an example would be kmail. i send you an email with a link and when you click on it, you expect mozilla to open with that page. well in kde, that only works if you have the %u option in the executable - provided you set up your file type to open html,shtml,etc. type documents with that shortcut link of the mozilla executable found in the kmenu. ie. the shortcut link executes the command linke /usr/local/mozilla/mozilla %u and you've set your filetype to open mozilla with that shortcut.

Thanks guys....I also found some info online talking about that as well (after posting)

However ........... you can't drag and drop things to the main K-Menu (ie. I cant drag an mp3 to the xmms icon located in the main menu) if it was an icon on the desktop or k-panel you could.
So I can't see whay the %u would be in the commmand line of the icon there.

I added Xmms to the Panel and with or without a %u it will launch an mp3 thats drag and dropped to it.

I also added an application buttton of Mozilla to the panel bar (just to see what would happen when dragging things to it etc) well it seems that dragging a html link to it doesn't open correctly it just opens the text in a browser window. (also it seems you cant drag and drop URL links from the Mozilla browser to the desktop ....it opens up a "Filename or clipboard" dialog) If you drag and drop a URL link from the Konqueror browser it does create a nice url link. Crazy stuff!

So now trying to solve the %u has lead to yet another question..haha. Why can't you drag and drop urls from mozilla to the desktop

Oh yeah here's a doozy! The Konqueror Web shortcut on the panel bar doesn't have a %u hahaha.

mine does. hahahaha...

kfmclient openProfile webbrowsing %u