Which linux environment varaiable gives the path to the users desktop?

Question

It turns out that different languages can have a path to the desktop folder.

~/Desktop is ~/Työpöytä in Finnish

What way via the shell can I get access to the translated folder?

PriceChild · Answer 1 · 2011-04-14 09:57:37Z

up vote 1 down vote accepted

Does ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs hold something like

XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Työpöytä"

or perhaps running

xdg-user-dir DESKTOP

though I guess this depends on your distribution...

answered Apr 14 '11 at 9:57

	using ubuntu 9.10 the first does not exist but the second surely does, thanks. – Phil Hannent Apr 15 '11 at 8:49
	Awesome! My guess is that the first is somewhere in /etc/ as a default... then you can change `~/.config/user-dirs.dirs` to override it. Either way, that command is probably better. Good luck! :-) – PriceChild Apr 15 '11 at 8:56

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