Newbie: diff between starting app from dock and starting from command line

Question

This isn't strictly a developer question, but I'm looking for some expert advice for troubleshooting a vexing problem with Apps--OpenOffice and NetBeans--that don't want to start from the dock but will happily start from a terminal window. When I start OO from the dock, I get an error message about the date command not found in the main.scpt. NetBeans just fails silently. This problem just started happening for no apparent reason--at least not apparent to my limited Mac experience.
I would greatly appreciate it if someone could enlighten me on what's going on here or perhaps give me some clues. I am mostly a web developer, so troubleshooting desktop apps is a bit foreign to me, and what little desktop programming experience I have has been on the MS platform. I appreciate your patience and understanding.

Answer 1

Thanks, etresoft, for your reply.
I have two users on this machine. Dock launch for both NetBeans and OpenOffice works for one user but not the other. I compared the output of the shell 'set' command for both users and the only material difference was that the user for which the dock launch works included '/Users/username' in the PATH variable. I added that to the 'broken' user's environment.plist, logged out, logged in, and the launch still failed.
The application launch fails on basic shell commands. Here are the console messages for the failed launch.
9/14/08 9:18:30 AM [0x0-0x188188].NetBeans 6.1[16363] /Applications/NetBeans/NetBeans 6.1.app/Contents/MacOS/netbeans: line 48: ls: command not found
9/14/08 9:18:30 AM [0x0-0x188188].NetBeans 6.1[16363] /Applications/NetBeans/NetBeans 6.1.app/Contents/MacOS/netbeans: line 53: dirname: command not found
9/14/08 9:18:30 AM [0x0-0x188188].NetBeans 6.1[16363] /Applications/NetBeans/NetBeans 6.1.app/Contents/MacOS/netbeans: line 57: dirname: command not found
9/14/08 9:18:30 AM [0x0-0x188188].NetBeans 6.1[16363] Cannot read cluster file: /../etc/netbeans.clusters
Here is the code for the NetBeans launch up to the failure point. The command not found messages refer to the ls and dirname commands in the while loop and the dirname command immediately following the while loop.
PRG=$0
while [ -h "$PRG" ]; do
ls=`ls -ld "$PRG"`
link=`expr "$ls" : '^.*-> \(.*\)$' 2>/dev/null`
if expr "$link" : '^/' 2> /dev/null >/dev/null; then
PRG="$link"
else
PRG="`dirname "$PRG"`/$link"
fi
done
progdir=`dirname "$PRG"`
if [ -f "$progdir"/../etc/netbeans.conf ] ; then
. "$progdir"/../etc/netbeans.conf
fi
# following should be done just in RPM or Solaris Launcher
# if [ -f /etc/netbeans.conf ] ; then
# . /etc/netbeans.conf
# fi
# #68373: look for userdir, but do not modify "$@"
userdir="${netbeansdefaultuserdir}"
founduserdir=""
for opt in "$@"; do
if [ "${founduserdir}" = "yes" ]; then
userdir="$opt"
break
elif [ "$opt" = "--userdir" ]; then
founduserdir="yes"
fi
done
if [ -f "${userdir}"/etc/netbeans.conf ] ; then
. "${userdir}"/etc/netbeans.conf
fi
if [ ! -f "$progdir"/../etc/netbeans.clusters ]; then
echo Cannot read cluster file: "$progdir"/../etc/netbeans.clusters 1>&2
exit 1
fi
It's obvious from the console output that progdir is not set correctly. I'm still trying to figure out why the shell commands are not found.
Thanks again for your previous reply.