How are programs executed in Ubuntu?

[Colin Law]

On 2 February 2016 at 03:12, blind Pete <0123peter at gmail.com> wrote:
> Colin Law wrote:
>
>> On 29 January 2016 at 21:00, Jim Byrnes <jf_byrnes at comcast.net> wrote:
>>> ...
>>> After much stumbling around I finally got this to work. The first thing I
>>> did wrong was to create a file called myprog.desktop based on the link
>>> you gave above and drop it in /local/share/applications. That did not
>>> work.
>>>
>>> Then I tried using the utilities mentioned in the link above, but they
>>> could
>>> not find the file even I was looking at it in Nemo.  Finally I used ls in
>>> a terminal and it showed up as myprog.desktop.desktop. Apparently that
>>> location adds .desktop by default but Nemo did not display it.
>>>
>>> Once I fixed that the desktop utilities put it in the proper location and
>>> I was able to put it on the launcher.
>>
>> Just checking that you realise that the proper place is
>> .local/share/applications.  Installed applications put their launchers
>> in /usr/share/applications but generally you should put diy ones in
>> .local/share/applications.
>>
>> Colin
>
> For a single user machine, put your personal configurations in
> ~/.local/share/applications and leave /usr/share/applications
> to Ubuntu.
>
> For a multi user machine the system administrator might put things in
> /usr/local/share/applications.  Stuff in /usr/local/ is available to
> all users and should not be overwritten by Ubuntu even during a
> re-install, *if* you put /usr/local/ on its own partition.

Does the Dash automatically pick up desktop files from
/usr/local/share/applications?

Colin