I am trying to open some Word documents that are in my Trash can using Openoffice, but nothing happens except the OO Writer splash screen. Fine, I'll just take them out of Trash, but why won't OO open them in Trash?

Try to do it from an xterm and see if it complains or something. Like this I guess.

Or wherever your trash can lies.

It doesn't recognize "oowrite." That's odd, since I assume you do know the command and I do have the Openoffice WP...

Files in the trash can may be compressed.
Look at the file using the `file' program.

That didn't work either, having an equally odd result:

Try oowriter, xoowriter or whatever. Also you can use TAB for autocompletion in command line.


Command line tools usually don't understand faked URIs like this one. All they understand is standard unix paths, which can contain file and dir names and slashes to separate path elements. So, first you need to locate what physical location holds your trash folder.

It will usually be something like ~/.Trash, ~/Trash, ~/Desktop/Trash or whatever.

I don't use this kind of "improvements" and I don't know what your desktop is either so I can't be any more concrete. I think that, in this case, abstraction is a bad thing because it just makes communication harder, like in this case. But that's food for another thread

Use autocompletion so that you get the spelling correct, including escaping characters that may need escaping.

I normally delete files in the console or use SHIFT-DEL to delete files rather then moving them to the trash. I tested deleting a file (to trash) and looked in .local/share/trash/ for the file. It was in the files subdirectory and the file was there and uncompressed.

Details may depend on the size of the file, the amount of free space, and maybe other things. In any case, why would you want to open a document from trash? Restore it first and "fo get bout it".

I'll try those things. Well, I don't use Trash to delete either, but to hold things I haven't decided what to do with and want out of the way. As far as I am concerned, Trash is a stupid Apple idea that Microsoft, being at least as stupid, imitated; and my reaction to it is "when I want a file deleted, I will delete it, thank you." I'd better stop before I get too far off topic with my various jokes about the Trash Can...

For the record, it's called swriter (the openoffice program).
cheers,
jdk

Not here, certainly

I've seen it as oowriter and xoowriter depending on versions. Maybe swriter is for star office, which is not quite the same.

I thought that you were not supposed to be able to look at items in the trash by default. Wouldn't it be a security flaw if others could view items that you have forgotten about in your trash?? Isn't this a good thing??

I wonder how are you going to retrieve them back again, then

I don't get your point. The trash folder lives in your $HOME, and it is your property. No one can see anything that you don't want them to see in your $HOME directory, let alone pick your files. Trash is not special, there's nothing magical about it, it's just another folder in your $HOME directory.

Nope. I have always used openoffice from openoffice.org and never staroffice. I've used it for a number of years and I can't remember the writer program being anything but swriter; the spreadsheet is scalc; the presentation simpress; the drawing program, sdraw, etc. I'm talking about the file name and not the app name. The file is typically found in ...openoffice.org3/program/swriter (under /opt in my case).
cheers,
jdk