#!/bin/sh
"/home/bigsmoke/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Microsoft Office/OFFICE11/XLVIEW.EXE" "$*"

This works pretty well, except when trying to view a document that’s not in the current directory:

xlview "/tmp/Some Excel sheet sent to me by someone.xls"

To make that work, you need to use a handy utility that comes with Wine, winepath. With winepath, I can modify the script to work (the example is for wordview):

#!/bin/bash
path=`winepath --windows "$*"`
"/home/bigsmoke/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Microsoft Office/OFFICE11/WORDVIEW.EXE" "$path"

This, together with Linux’s binfmt_misc makes executing Windows programs on Linux a breeze.

I want to write down what I had to do to be able to execute Windows executables as if they are Linux native. This can be done thanks to Linux’ support for misc. binaries.

First, you have to enable CONFIG_BINFMT_MISC in your kernel configuration. If it was configured as a module, run /sbin/modprobe binfmt_misc.

Then you have to register the appropriate binary formats:

echo ':windows:M::MZ::/usr/bin/wine:' > /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register

That’s it. Of course, the .exe files need to have their executable bit set:

chmod u+x program.exe

Done.