Bash – Wait until gnome-terminal ends

You're right, in that minicom won't communicate the fact of a window change to the far end. If you're using a VT100-like emulation, you might be able to do a

eval `resize`

to generate some control characters that will force the emulator to tell the far end the size of its window.

On Debian-like systems, resize is in the xterm package.

This should give you all (OK: most. What have I forgotten? Sockets?) file system activities which include writes:

strace -f command 2>&1 | 
  grep -e '^open.*O_CREAT' \
    -e ^write   \
    -e ^mkdir   \
    -e ^rmdir   \
    -e ^unlink  \
    -e ^rename  \
    -e ^chmod   \
    -e ^link    \
    -e ^symlink \
    -e ^mknod

With this information a working chroot environment can be created in tmpfs (as an action of last resort; maybe symlinks to tmpfs are enough). If the program is started in a RAM chroot then it does not have a chance to wake the disk directly. No write to its file system hierarchy is ever written to disk.