Open File Explorer on a File that is open by another Application

What you might do to identify what file is shown in a window when using Foliate, is to look at the window name propery, which seems to hold the document title. You can get this interactively from xdotool selectwindow getwindowname or xprop WM_NAME.

You can then wrap Foliate inside a shell script so that when you run, say, myFoliate myfile.epub it can add to a log file the filename $PWD/$1 (or $1 if it begins /) and the equivalent title. When you later select a window, you can get the name which is the title, and look up this in the log to find the filename.

Getting the title for an epub file is feasible: the format is a zipped archive, with the <title> in xml in toc.ncx.

Instead, you can run something like

xdotool search --class 'Foliate' | xargs -i xdotool getwindowname {} 

at the start of the script to get the list of current names/titles, then again a few seconds after starting Foliate in the background. The new entry will be the new title.

This will not be able to distinguish between two versions of the same document with the same title. Instead, you can note in the log the window-id of the newly created window (using just xdotool search --class Foliate which outputs the list of window-ids), together with the filename. Then when you select the window, you lookup this number, rather than the title.

Obviously, the last match in the log should be used, if there are many out-of-date entries.

Here is a possible implementation as a script, myfoliate, which is called with either a filename, or -q to select a window and retrieve a filename. It is a bit overcomplicated as I added a locking mechanism to avoid getting the wrong id if two new Foliate windows are opened at once. The declare -A makes the variable windows an associative array, with the window ids as keys so we can easily find a new missing entry. The sleep 2 may need to be increased if Foliate is slow to start. The log file should probably be emptied at the start if it can be determined that there is no current Foliate running.

#!/bin/bash log=$HOME/.myfoliate.log if [ $# -ne 1 ] then echo "$0: usage: <filename> or -q" exit 1 fi if [ '-q' = "$1" ] then id=$(xdotool selectwindow) gawk <$log -v id="$id" ' $1==id { $1 = ""; file=$0; } END{ print file; exit(file==""); }' exit fi if [[ "$1" =~ ^/ ]] then file=$1 else file=$PWD/$1 fi listwindows(){ xdotool search --class 'Foliate' } ( flock -n 9 || exit 2 declare -A windows for id in $(listwindows) do windows[$id]=1 done Foliate "$1" 9>&- & sleep 2 for id in $(listwindows) do if [ "${windows[$id]}" == "" ] then newwin=$id fi done if [ -z "$newwin" ] then echo "$0: failed" exit 3 fi echo "$newwin $file" >&9 ) 9>>$log