Thanks Dominik, Steve, and Tomas for your mail. For reference, Steve Litt responded to me privately to consider first running 'ps axjf' by hand, in which case the environment should be obvious, presumably doing this in a few different environments, and then attempting to write some parsing code which goes through the same mental steps. Certainly sounds reasonable absent an api, so thanks Steve for the suggestion.
Thanks Dominik for the stack exchange link, which is basically the same question (except that i would not be programming it in bash), with some interesting ideas about environment variables to inspect. (Part of the SE discussion in fact suggests using ps.) Finally thanks for your response Tomas, with which i think most people would agree. That is, i think usually the best practice is to do capability detection (like the autoconf apparatus or jquery does) and then use whatever capabilities you detect. I'm not sure this is always possible, though, because if it is something about the using the hardware in a certain way you may not be able to detect this (but rather rely on what you know about the environment). I was sort of hoping that somebody would answer saying "Use the foo() function in the XYZ api". Then at least i'd know to go find the XYZ api and study it, because it would probably have a lot of other goodies in it as well. And i'm still interested in that, but given Dominick's reference i'm kind of doubtful i'll find it. Anyhow, thanks again everybody for your help! :) dan On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 1:02 AM, <to...@tuxteam.de> wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 10:17:37PM -0700, Dan Hitt wrote: >> Is there a programmatic way that a piece of software can learn what >> desktop environment it is executing in? > > Just out of curiosity: what is (roughly) your use case? > > (Personally I think it's a bad idea, but I'd like to learn) > > regards > - -- t > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux) > > iEYEARECAAYFAljLmC4ACgkQBcgs9XrR2kYBoACZAVOgMl1I2DyFdJSp1FMMy5eA > /rMAn0BTT1VByF5rhECqo47jAexuAFhG > =ucsZ > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- >
