I'm going to use the game "cosmoteer" as an example (as it's free), but I ran into this with others.

Issue:
If I run:

cd /path/to/executable/
wine exec.exe

The program runs.

But if I do:

wine /path/to/executable/exec.exe

The program / application changes the "working directory" (I think it's called like this) and fails to execute.
Do you guys know what is the issue here? I can't find a solution on the internet that resembles this one. Or at least one that has a solution, most of them are empty threads with no answer.

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2 Answers

The issue is that wine has an special command for this. You must issue the

wine start /d <path> 

where <path> is the directory to start in.

The wine executable doesn't change directory to the path of the executable that you're passing it. That's necessary otherwise you wouldn't be able to for example run wine /path/to/7-zip and have it operate on the current directory... it would always annoyingly and uselessly operate on the 7-zip directory!

Frequently with windows apps there are various dependencies in the folder with the executable, so it's good to cd there before running it. If you don't want to lose your current directory you can always:

pushd /path/to/executable/
wine exec.exe;
popd

Hope that helps.

PS I'd love to know what steps you took and what luck you have getting cosmoteer to run. My buddy is temporarily infatuated with this game and I'd like to poke around it but I can't get the installer to run. It just tells me that my system doesn't meet the dotnet framework requirements, but I used playonlinux to install the latest (4.5) into the bottle ahead of the game...

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