Ubuntu – Run script in Terminal via context menu (Open with Terminal)

bashcontext menufilemanagergnome-terminal

this question is simple about "Open/Run in Terminal"….

Looks Ubunutu doesn't support bash/shell-scripts the way we know from KDE and any other OS:

I tried the obvious:

Right click in file manager
Open with other Application…
Show all applications

but there is no Terminal application listed, only "Find Online Applications". You can't even browse for a new application as you would do in any other OS.

Any ideas? I found only hacks like creating a launcher item but that's far from a solution or ideal.

To make it really clear:

I want to run any bash script accessible with the file manager via right-click, "Open with" -> "Terminal" so i can see the output. Its really like double click on a batch file under Windows and it just runs the bloody script, not closing the terminal except I wrote so in the script. So finally this is NOT about double click to run, its about the running the script through context menu as said in the title already!

thanks!

Ubuntu-x64-14.04/Unity/No Mods or tweaks.

Best Answer

The clean way would be to create a .desktop file for your script and then make it the default text editor.

Create a file called /usr/share/applications/openscript.desktop with the following contents:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Open script in terminal
Exec=gnome-terminal -e "%U"
Terminal=false
Type=Application
MimeType=text/plain;

Then, do these steps:

Log out/in (I don't know if it's necessary)
Right click on the file
Click on Open with...
Click on Another app...
Select "Open script in terminal"
You're done!

Use Nemo.

There you can add a button in the Toolbar to open Terminal in current folder.

Ubuntu – Let Nautilus open script as Terminal window

Introduction

The script below puts together several ideas of how gnome-terminal and bash shell operate, to create a right-click menuentry for running a selected program in graphical terminal. Of course, this is not double-click via mouse, but still a usable and quick solution. It can be even speedier via right-click and hitting S key to quickly jump into "Scripts" submenu. Additionally, this can work with several selected files and will open terminal window for each one of them.

Demo

Suppose we have a tester script (which merely prints "Hello World" and exits) in some directory opened with Nautilus. Lets assume this script already has executable permissions. Right click on the file , select Scripts -> run_with_terminal.py

Terminal window will appear, and appropriately give the output, and wait till user hits Enter to exit.

Script Source

Also available on GitHub

#!/usr/bin/env python
from os import path
from sys import argv
from subprocess import call

for item in argv[1:]:
    full_path = path.abspath('./' + item)
    call(['gnome-terminal','-e', 
          "bash -c '" +  full_path + ";read'"])

Privileged version

#!/usr/bin/env python
from os import path
from sys import argv
from subprocess import call

for item in argv[1:]:
    full_path = path.abspath('./' + item)
    call(['gnome-terminal','-e', 
          "pkexec bash -c '" +  full_path + ";read'"])

Principle of operation

Gnome Terminal ( which is default terminal on Ubuntu ) allows running a command with -e flag, but problem is that it waits for command to exit. If you have a script or executable that only prints something to the screen and exits immediately, you'll only see terminal window flash and disappear.

Essentially it allows only running one command. On the other hand, if we use bash -c 'command1;command2;command3' , this will be treated by gnome-terminal as one command, but would allow us in fact to run several as child processes of the bash shell. This is nothing new and has been shown long before.

Finally, to keep window from immediately exiting, we use read command that just reads stdin. Basic use for this is to allow user to close window by hitting Enter key ( sort of adapted trick from using getch() from C programming in an IDE)

The file manager ( aka Nautilus ) allows use of custom scripts (placed in `~/.local/nautilus/scripts) that operate upon selected file/folder. They're accessible from right clicking on file and selecting appropriate entry in Scripts submenu.

Thus putting all of this knowledge together, we get the working script you see above. Python was merely a language of choice for me, but this same idea could have been implemented in either perl,ruby,shell script, etc.