Gnome Terminal – Open Window and Execute Two Commands

gnome-terminal

I have a script which runs in the background (without terminal windows or TTY) and occasionally does something.

I now want it to do another thing when it does something and it is to open a Gnome Terminal window and execute 2 commands. Actually, I only need to execute 1 command but I want to make the terminal window stay open so I can see the output of the command. The command prints both on stdout and stderr and its output changes over time, so just writing it to a file and sending some kind of notification wouldn't do the job very well.

I can get Gnome Terminal to open a window and execute 1 command:

gnome-terminal -e "sleep 10"

I chose sleep as the long-running command for simplicity. However, when adding another command, no terminal window opens:

gnome-terminal -e "echo test; sleep 10"

What's the solution to this?

Best Answer

gnome-terminal treats everything in quotes as one command, so in order to run many of them consecutively you need to start interpreter (usually a shell), and do stuff inside it, for instance:

gnome-terminal -e 'sh -c "echo test; sleep 10"'

BTW, you may want the window to stay open even after commands finish their job, in such case just start new shell, or replace a current with the new one:

gnome-terminal -e 'sh -c "echo test; sleep 10; exec bash"'

Related Solutions

Linux – Ranger file manager – Open gnome-terminal instead of xterm

As of 2017, the source-code (runner.py) did this:

        term = os.environ.get('TERMCMD', os.environ.get('TERM'))
        if term not in get_executables():
            term = 'x-terminal-emulator'
        if term not in get_executables():
            term = 'xterm'
        if isinstance(action, str):
            action = term + ' -e ' + action
        else:
            action = [term, '-e'] + action

so you should be able to put any xterm-compatible program name in TERMCMD. However, note the use of -e (gnome-terminal doesn't match xterm's behavior). If you are using Debian/Ubuntu/etc, the Debian packagers have attempted to provide a wrapper to hide this difference in the x-terminal-emulator feature. If that applies to you, you could set TERMCMD to x-terminal-emulator.

Followup - while the design of the TERMCMD feature has not changed appreciably since mid-2016, the location within the source has changed:

Refactor and improve the TERMCMD handling moved it to ranger/ext/get_executables.py

That is implemented in get_term:

def get_term():
    """Get the user terminal executable name.
    Either $TERMCMD, $TERM, "x-terminal-emulator" or "xterm", in this order.
    """
    command = environ.get('TERMCMD', environ.get('TERM'))
    if shlex.split(command)[0] not in get_executables():
        command = 'x-terminal-emulator'
        if command not in get_executables():
            command = 'xterm'
    return command

which uses x-terminal-emulator as before.

There is a related use of TERMCMD in rifle.py, used for executing commands rather than (as asked in the question) for opening a terminal. Either way, the key to using ranger is x-terminal-emulator, since GNOME Terminal's developers do not document their command-line interface, while Debian developers have provided this workaround.

Quoting from Bug 701691 – -e accepts only one term; all other terminal emulators accept more than one term (which the developer refused to fix, marking it "not a bug"):

Christian Persch 2013-06-06 16:02:54 UTC

There are no docs for the gnome-terminal command line options.

Ubuntu – Gnome-terminal custom command and dynamic working directory

As Gilles mentioned in a comment, setting the SHELL variable works as well. It does not have downside of my other answer. Here are the details:

Create .xsessionrc in your home directory with contents:
```
SHELL=/usr/bin/fish
```
Disable custom command in gnome-terminal profile options.
Log out and in again.

Gnome-terminal should respect the variable and use that custom command. It does for me on Ubuntu 16.04.1 and solves the working directory problem.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – Ranger file manager – Open gnome-terminal instead of xterm

Ubuntu – Gnome-terminal custom command and dynamic working directory

Related Question