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I start music or video with right click and "open with" in Thunar (Xfce). For every entry, there is a *.desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications or /usr/share/applications. I want to start an application with a pipe and save the output in a file.

This works in terminal:

mpv file.mp4 > log 2>&1

But that doesn't work when I add the same line to the desktop file:

Exec=mpv file.mp4 > log 2>&1

The file is started, but there is no output. How can I do this? Is there something special when using desktop files? also starting with terminal=true, but that didn't work.

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    Try Exec=sh -c "mpv file.mp4 > log 2>&1" Commented Aug 13, 2024 at 21:30
  • @ G-Man Thats it, thanks. Commented Aug 14, 2024 at 12:10
  • @G-ManSays'ReinstateMonica' surprisingly this doesn't seem to have been answered before (at least, I couldn't find a convincing duplicate) - please consider turning your comment into an answer Commented Aug 14, 2024 at 13:10

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Apparently Thunar (or whatever tool parses the desktop files) doesn’t understand shell syntax like > and 2>&1.  So the standard solution is to explicitly invoke a shell to handle the command, like this:

Exec=sh -c "mpv file.mp4 > log 2>&1"
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