Ubuntu – How to use a C program to run a command on terminal

Did you really mean to put the \ at the end of the line? If not then try removing those - they escape the following character.

also, dropping the -X helps the setup work for me, for instance:

screen -S test -d -m -X touch /tmp/test

fails with No screen session found, however:

screen -S test -d -m touch /tmp/test

works fine. As such I suspect the following will work for you:

#!/bin/bash
screen -S test -d -m $HOME/folder/folder/.program
screen -S test2 -d -m $HOME/folder/folder/.program2

Remember, that if you run this at boot time, $HOME is not the same as after you log in as a specific user. If you need to run it as a certain user you'll need to use the likes of su to run it as that user, and specifying the full path will remove any ambiguity:

#!/bin/bash
screen -S test -d -m su - username /home/username/folder/folder/.program
screen -S test2 -d -m su - username /home/username/folder/folder/.program2

Or, you would call the entire script above as su - username /path/to/your/script.

When you invoke a script like

myscript parameter1 parameter2

the parameter1, parameter2 etc. values from the command line are available inside the script as positional parameters $0, $1, ... etc

• parameter $0 contains the name by which the script was invoked (myscript)
• parameter $1 contains the value parameter1
• parameter $2 contains the value parameter2
• and so on

So in your case if you want to run your script like

inst program

to install program, then inside the script you can write

apt-get install "$1"

See for example Handling positional parameters at http://wiki.bash-hackers.org