diff --git a/ChangeLog b/ChangeLog
index 1774fccf056f7798f904a24de272b3ad44b694e4..9e5f602500cdabe6233214aec75fa8161a25c241 100644
--- a/ChangeLog
+++ b/ChangeLog
@@ -1,3 +1,14 @@
+2008-11-20	Jannis Pohlmann <jannis@xfce.org>
+
+	* thunar/thunar-application.c (thunar_application_process_filenames):
+	  Always show an error dialog if one of the files passed via the
+	  command line cannot be opened. Required for exo-open to give proper
+	  visual feedback because spawning Thunar asynchronously will always
+	  make exo-open think that the file(s) were opened successfully.
+	  Ideally Thunar would display an error dialog with a tree view
+	  listing all the files that could not be opened (I'll file a bug for
+	  this).
+
 2008-11-15	Jannis Pohlmann <jannis@xfce.org>
 
 	* plugins/, tdb/, thunar-vfs/, thunar/: Fix several compiler warnings.
diff --git a/thunar/thunar-application.c b/thunar/thunar-application.c
index 548215df4208038b3f2398cbf7de71ae4b1a149b..5fdb4a0e56e3b16c4f5538a817032ba9532a282f 100644
--- a/thunar/thunar-application.c
+++ b/thunar/thunar-application.c
@@ -1113,6 +1113,9 @@ thunar_application_process_filenames (ThunarApplication *application,
   return TRUE;
 
 failure:
+  /* tell the user that we were unable to launch the file specified on the cmdline */
+  thunar_dialogs_show_error (screen, derror, _("Failed to open \"%s\""), filenames[n]);
+
   g_set_error (error, derror->domain, derror->code, _("Failed to open \"%s\": %s"), filenames[n], derror->message);
   thunar_file_list_free (file_list);
   g_error_free (derror);