Ubuntu – How to change terminal theme / behavior

According to the python docs, you want to use Popen.communicate(input=None) http://docs.python.org/2/library/subprocess.html#popen-objects

I would recommend that you edit your command from python before sending it to another process. For example, display a window with the default command and allow the user to edit (or cancel) it before executing it. Also, "gnome-terminal" is probably overkill for this, "/bin/bash" should be sufficient.

If that doesn't work for you, you could also try this. (depending on what you are actually running from the terminal) Since you mentioned users could edit the command, it would be a good idea to validate the input before running.

command = ['ls','-l']
output = subprocess.check_output( command )
print( output )

You can use this for files:

zenity --file-selection

and this for folders:

zenity --file-selection --directory

for usage, run:

zenity --help-general
zenity --help-file-selection

Generally it matches the current theme (for GTK window managers anyway), on my machine with a modded version of Zukitwo 3.8 it looks like this:

One way of using it is like this:

echo "you selected $(zenity --file-selection)"

Which would result in you selected /path/to/file.

You can also use options to set an appropriate title, and the directory it starts in - With your rsync use case, for example:

zenity --file-selection --directory --title="Choose rsync source directory" --filename=$HOME/Desktop/

For files, you can also specify a filetype to select - e.g:

zenity --file-selection --file-filter='PDF files (pdf) | *.pdf' --title="Select a PDF file"

NOTE: You can also use YAD, a fork of Zenity that has loads more features.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/y-ppa-manager
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install yad

^Source

For the most part you can use it the same way - for the file browser:

yad --file-selection

and for the help page:

yad --help-all

Though at the time (around version 26?), it had not been updated to match the new GTK 3.14+ interface (zenity had) - it has more features, but check compatibility (based on documentation it should work on GTK+ >= 2.16.0