afzal@cui.unige.ch (Afzal Ballim) (04/17/91)
X Window System Bug Report xbugs@expo.lcs.mit.edu VERSION: R4 CLIENT MACHINE and OPERATING SYSTEM: All DISPLAY TYPE: All WINDOW MANAGER: All AREA: Xrm, Xt[App]Initialize (depending on how you look at it) SYNOPSIS: Executable for an X Window application cannot contain the symbol "." in its name if it is using the Resource Manager. DESCRIPTION: Okay, so some will not consider this a bug, but to the best of my knowledge it is not documented anywhere and I spent a frustrating time tracking this down. The character "." is significant to the resource manager, and so cannot be used as the name of an application. As the name of an application is taken from argv[0], this means that the executable cannot contain the character "." in its name. If you are used to setting resources by application class, then this can cause perplexing problems because they work fine (you explicitly state the application class), however command-line options using the "options" feature of XtInitialize/XtAppInitialize will not work. REPEAT BY: Rename any executable to have a "." in its name. SAMPLE FIX: Never under any circumstances use a "." in the name of the executable of an X Window application. My preferred fix, however, is to allow explicit setting of application names, and not use argv[0].