Ubuntu – Moving tab title position from top to bottom in Ubuntu terminal

As you can see in other answers, the title of the tab is changed by the shell every time it outputs a prompt. And after executing top your tab exits because the command you told it to run finishes...

I'll do the following:

Step 1: call the terminal with shells, adding environment variables like that:

gnome-terminal --tab -t X -e "env MYTAB=X bash" --tab -t Y -e "env MYTAB=Y bash" 

Step 2: add at the end of your .bashrc the following code:

#if MYTAB is not set, return
[ -z "$MYTAB" ] && return
# reset the cursor and title 
PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$ '
PS1="\[\e]0;$MYTAB \w\a\]$PS1"   #title: $MYTAB and current dir
# execute the commands for every tab
case "$MYTAB" in
        X)
                echo this is X
        ;;

        Y)
                echo this is Y 
                top
        ;;
esac

...which I think is easy to understand and you can modify with the command/tweaks you need. Tested and works ok; after you exit top from the tab you'll still have the prompt and the tab for you to peruse.

Screenshot (after pressing "q" in top):

If you want to use a function stored in ~/.bashrc then source that file in your command:

gnome-terminal --tab -e "bash -c 'source ~/.bashrc;set-title 99;ping 192.168.7.99'"

You've mentioned in the comments that you plan to use this in a shell script and with multiple gnome-terminal tabs. As a proof of concept, you can use the following script as example:

#!/bin/bash
gnome-terminal --tab -e "bash -c 'printf \"\033]0;TEST1\007\"; sleep 7'" \
               --tab -e "bash -c 'printf \"\033]0;TEST2\007\"; ping -c 4 8.8.8.8'" \

Instead of bash function, this uses printf and escape sequences directly. Please be mindful of the backslashes.