I have been searching all day and can not find a thing on this problem. I am writing a script (in tcsh) that is initializing a program (specifically kuickshow in the kde environment) in the background. What I want is for that program to open up on top of all other windows (IOW with the ">Advanced->Keep Above Others" flag set (Actually I would prefer that, along with the ">To Desktop->All Desktops" flag set - but I'll take what I can get). Or at least pass the focus to the new window through the script, so rises to the top layer.

the -geometry flag doesn't help, for one it's opening a specific .jpg file and the geometry command apparently gets overwritten by the file size. But even if I could change the size or even make it go full screen, it still comes up behind the other windows. It's designed to be an alarm - but it's not much good if it's hidden when it comes up.

Anyone know how to commnad the layers of the system in a command line?

Thanks
Dono

Some WM's might have a way to access the WM api from the command line. Kwin had dcop (and now supposedly dcop) for that, though I have no idea if that concrete functionality is accessible or not, but you could investigate along those lines.

Fvwm -which I use- lets you to do so without problems using the FvwmCommand module, that could be used from any scripting or programming language.

In other WM's you might want to investigate other tools, maybe wmctrl or devilspie can do this, but I am not sure at all.