I recall that reply, now that you point it out.  It predates my current
need a bit but is also a little different.  The OP there appeared to be
looking for a way to associate apps with extensions, and I'm certainly
not going to do anything like that.

I've already worked out the simplest possible mechanisms in Win2K and
beyond (since our app no longer supports anything earlier) and Mac OS X,
to simply invoke a "file:" URL and let the system pass it on to the
associated application.

Based on your info above, and a quick test showing that the kfmclient
command you've provided works great on my Linux box, I think I need to
look at whether I can maybe let a user specify the method of doing it in
Linux.  That is, perhaps a properties file where the user makes an entry
providing the command line needed in their particular window manager,
which I can then read, parse, and hand off to Runtime.exec to get the
job done.

Thanks for the response -- it's helped tremendously.

= Steve =