Xterm and .Xresources

[cdoerbec at cso.fmr.com (Christoph Doerbeck A242369)]

"John Chambers,,,781-647-1813" wrote:

> One question:  While the file is called "XTerm", the  app  is  called
> "xterm".   How do you know to change the capitalization like that?  I
> checked with the "man xterm" page, and there is no occurrence of  the
> strings  "XAPPLRESDIR" or "XTerm" anywhere, so there's no obvious way
> a user could ever learn this sort of thing.

The XAPPLRESDIR is part of X11, and might be documented in `man X11`.
I'm not near a Linux box, so I can't promise this.

LD_LIBRARY_PATH is another such variable that does the same thing.  I
believe that one of these was introduced with CDE, and was simply
adopted by applications to work in general.  Don't know for sure...
 
> I notice that in this case the file and the program seem to have  the
> same name. What's the rule here? Is it documented anywhere? How can a
> user get a handle on this?

If it's not documented in the man page, I simply play with the filename.
Typically it's the name of the application, with the first two characters
being uppercase.  Another technique, might be to run your app with strace
and see what files it trys to open..

	strace xterm 2>&1 | grep open

might reveal something.  I just tried this on my SUN at work using 'truss'
and it worked.

> There are quite a lot of other apps that  have  similar  undocumented
> resources.  Is there some general way to learn what I should put into
> an .app-defaults file?  Is it documented anywhere?
>

My way, although crude, when resources aren't documented properly is
to run the following...

	strings `which xterm` | grep -i font

And that should list all the font resources your app looks for.
 

- Christoph


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