5.1. How to run Wine

Wine is a very complicated piece of software with many ways to adjust how it runs. With very few exceptions, you can activate the same set of features through the configuration file as you can with command-line parameters. In this chapter, we'll briefly discuss these parameters, and match them up with their corresponding configuration variables.

You can invoke the wine --help command to get a listing of all Wine's command-line parameters:

Usage: ./wine [options] program_name [arguments] Options: --debugmsg name Turn debugging-messages on or off --dll name Enable or disable built-in DLLs --help,-h Show this help message --version,-v Display the Wine version

You can specify as many options as you want, if any. Typically, you will want to have your configuration file set up with a sensible set of defaults; in this case, you can run wine without explicitly listing any options. In rare cases, you might want to override certain parameters on the command line.

After the options, you should put the name of the file you want wine to execute. If the executable is in the Path parameter in the configuration file, you can simply give the executable file name. However, if the executable is not in Path, you must give the full path to the executable (in Windows format, not UNIX format!). For example, given a Path of the following:

[wine]
"Path"="c:\\windows;c:\\windows\\system;e:\\;e:\\test;f:\\"
      

You could run the file c:\windows\system\foo.exe with:

$ wine foo.exe
      

However, you would have to run the file c:\myapps\foo.exe with this command:

$ wine c:\\myapps\\foo.exe
      

(note the backslash-escaped "\" !)

If you want to run a console program (aka a CUI executable), use wineconsole instead of wine to start it. It will display the program in a separate Window (this requires X11 to be run). If you don't, you'll still be able to run your program directly in the Unix console where you started it, but with very limited capacities (so your program might work, but your mileage may vary). This shall be improved in the future.