How to make Xfce terminal run a command when it starts

xfce4-terminal

I want the Xfce terminal to run a command when it is turned on, for example print a welcome message or some system stats. I want this message to be printed only on the Xfce terminal emulator when it starts, not on some other terminal emulators. Can I achieve this effect by modifying the file terminalrc? How?

Best Answer

If you absolutely want to do this, I see two approaches:

1) Make a bash (or whatever shell you use) profile script that gets the parent PID to see if it is running under xfce4-terminal, and, if so, prints your message.

2) Something like this (note you may have to re-run it after OS upgrades, or it may even befuddle your package manager into not working properly anymore):

W="$(which xfce4-terminal)"
sudo cp "$W" "$W".orig
sudo tee "$W" <<EOF
#!/usr/bin/env bash
exec ${W}.orig -e 'sh -c "echo this is xfce4-terminal ... ; bash"'
EOF
sudo chmod a+x "$W"
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