Ubuntu – How to get the name of the current terminal from command-line

Original version

One way to do this is to get the parent process of your current shell session and from there the name of the terminal.

1. Get the parent of the current shell process. The bash variable $$ is the PID of your current shell, so we can give that as a query to ps (-p $$) and ask it tp print the PID of the parent process (-o ppid=, the trailing = is to avoid printing column headers):

   $ ps -p $$ -o ppid=
   544
   

   So, the PID of my shell's parent is 544.

2. Get the process associated with that PID and print its command line

   $ ps -p 544 o args=
   /usr/bin/python /usr/bin/terminator
   

   The above output will depend on what terminal emulator you are using, I am using terminator.

3. Combine everything in a single command

   ps -p $(ps -p $$ -o ppid=) o args=
   

4. Use that to get the version

   $(ps -p $(ps -p $$ -o ppid=) o args=) --version
   terminator 0.97
   

5. Add a little function to your ~/.bashrc that returns the name and version of the terminal emulator you're using (this works for most common terminal emulators):

   which_term(){
       term=$(ps -p $(ps -p $$ -o ppid=) -o args=);
       found=0;
       case $term in
           *gnome-terminal*)
               found=1
               echo "gnome-terminal " $(dpkg -l gnome-terminal | awk '/^ii/{print $3}')
               ;;
           *lxterminal*)
               found=1
               echo "lxterminal " $(dpkg -l lxterminal | awk '/^ii/{print $3}')
               ;;
           rxvt*)
               found=1
               echo "rxvt " $(dpkg -l rxvt | awk '/^ii/{print $3}')
               ;;
           ## Try and guess for any others
           *)
               for v in '-version' '--version' '-V' '-v'
               do
                   $term "$v" &>/dev/null && eval $term $v && found=1 && break
               done
               ;;
       esac
       ## If none of the version arguments worked, try and get the 
       ## package version
       [ $found -eq 0 ] && echo "$term " $(dpkg -l $term | awk '/^ii/{print $3}')    
   }
   

   You can now get the name of the terminal and also pass any option you like to it (such as --version.

Some examples using different terminals:

1. xterm

   $ which_term
   XTerm(297)
   

2. terminator

   $ which_term 
   terminator 0.97
   

3. rxvt, this one has none of the -V, -version or --version flags so no version info is printed.

   $  which_term
   rxvt  1:2.7.10-5
   

4. gnome-terminal.

   $ which_term
   gnome-terminal  3.10.1-1
   

5. konsole

   $ which_term
   Qt: 4.8.6
   KDE Development Platform: 4.11.3
   Konsole: 2.11.3
   

6. lxterminal

   $ which_term
   lxterminal  0.1.11-4
   

7. xfce4-terminal

   $ which_term
   xfce4-terminal 0.6.2 (Xfce 4.10)
   
   Copyright (c) 2003-2012
       The Xfce development team. All rights reserved.
   
   Written by Benedikt Meurer <benny@xfce.org>
   and Nick Schermer <nick@xfce.org>.
   
   Please report bugs to <http://bugzilla.xfce.org/>.
   

New and improved

The above approach is not that trustworthy though. It will choke when you run your shell after suing to another user or when your terminal is aliased to something and various other cases. Since we are obviously working with X programs here, a better way might be to use something like xdotool (installable with sudo apt-get install xdotool) to get the information instead:

perl -lpe 's/\0/ /g' /proc/$(xdotool getwindowpid $(xdotool getactivewindow))/cmdline

The above will print the command line used to launch the currently active window. Since your terminal will, presumably, be active, that is the command it will show. This means that for most terminal emulators, you can safely assume that the 1st field returned is the terminal name:

$ which_term 
lxterminal 

This means that getting the version is trivial. For example

$ dpkg -l $(which_term) | awk '/^ii/{print $3}'
0.1.11-4

Not so for gnome-terminal:

$ which_term 
/usr/lib/gnome-terminal/gnome-terminal-server 

or terminator:

$ which_term
/usr/bin/python /usr/bin/terminator 

So, we can make it a little more complex (there are some bashisms here, this one is not portable):

which_term(){
    term=$(perl -lpe 's/\0/ /g' \
           /proc/$(xdotool getwindowpid $(xdotool getactivewindow))/cmdline)

    ## Enable extended globbing patterns
    shopt -s extglob
    case $term in
        ## If this terminal is a python or perl program,
        ## then the emulator's name is likely the second 
        ## part of it
        */python*|*/perl*    )
         term=$(basename "$(readlink -f $(echo "$term" | cut -d ' ' -f 2))")
         version=$(dpkg -l "$term" | awk '/^ii/{print $3}')
         ;;
        ## The special case of gnome-terminal
        *gnome-terminal-server* )
          term="gnome-terminal"
        ;;
        ## For other cases, just take the 1st
        ## field of $term
        * )
          term=${term/% */}
        ;;
     esac
     version=$(dpkg -l "$term" | awk '/^ii/{print $3}')
     echo "$term  $version"
}

This works for all cases I tested on.