Wine and WINEPREFIX calling convention: same line, don't like non-absolute paths

[Passerby]

I have three questions that deserve their own posts.
1. This one, is just weird behaviour (I figured it out myself only to open up more questions)
2. Is a colour error
3. Is a pixel positioning and numeric error related to the virtual desktop.

Number One:

Disclaimer: I'm new to Wine. I have been avoiding it for over a decade as a Linux user for "contamination" concerns - practical and philosophical, yet here I am, clueless...

So, I do not want Wine prefixes in my home dir as that is reserved for configs only. My storage is a separate partition, let's call it "store" and that is where Wine prefixes will go: [monospace]$HOME/store/wine/[/monospace] with each prefix as the app name. At each prefix's root level, I have a 100% portable script to invoke the app. This takes fancy footwork to avoid using anything but relative paths. During this time, I struggled to get it working without one of the following problems:
- Wine defaults to $HOME/.wine32 and starts creating a new prefix
- Wine produces an error that it couldn't find a path (which exists) and the error's path looks something like this: L"/path/it/could/not/find" which makes no sense.
- The app starts but cannot locate a specific resource (this happened when I tried to use cd instead of env since I was trying to do some other things before calling Wine).
Anyways, I had typed out my question, but before posting, I went over things again and finally figured it out myself: The WINEPREFIX=/prefix/path/ declaration must be on the same line as the Wine /execute/this/app.exe invocation.

My Questions are:
* Why must WINEPREFIX be declared on the same line Wine is invoked (seemingly)?
* Why does it not play too nicely with non-absolute paths (at least, why all the messing around)?

[madewokherd]

Uh, because that's how the Unix shell works. Shell variables aren't visible to programs as environment variables unless you use the export command (which applies to subsequent commands) or specify them on the same line (which is temporary).

Wine also has no way of knowing what your working directory was when you set the variable.