Set starting directory for gnome-terminal profile

Use the -t option. (see gnome-terminal --help-terminal-options)

gnome-terminal \
--tab -t "notes" --working-directory=$HOME/notes  \
--tab -t "puppet" --working-directory=$HOME/puppet \
--tab -t "beamish" --profile=root-beamish           \
--tab -t "odyssey" --profile=odyssey                \
--tab -t "root" --profile=root

-------- updated at 2011-11-15 22:00:00 --------

So... that worked for me on Solaris 11 Express, with gnome-terminal 2.30.2.

Since then, I've been able to test it on Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty), which uses 2.32.1, and found exactly the same behavior as you.

In the case of Ubuntu, I was able to track it to the ubuntu .bashrc file. In particular, the section that looks like:

# If this is an xterm set the title to user@host:dir
case "$TERM" in
xterm*|rxvt*)
    PS1="\[\e]0;${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h: \w\a\]$PS1"
    ;;
*)
    ;;
esac

In this case, the PS1 variable is being expanded for terminal types matching xterm* and rxvt*.

PS1="\[\e]0;${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h: \w\a\]$PS1"

specifically the part between PS1="\[\e]0; and \a\]. Those get turned into the window title.

Once I commented out that whole case statement, the behavior of gnome-terminal with the -t option worked as expected. I'll see if I can find a CentOS 6 box to test this with, too.

-------- updated at 2017-11-1 09:38:00 --------

So it looks like more recent versions of Gnome-Terminal have made away with some useful features, like the simple -t option to set terminal titles.

It is still possible to set terminal titles at runtime, it's just ugly as hell now. You can use printf or echo in the command to effect a title.

For example:

To start a terminal window with 1 tab, titled 'My Fancy Title' using printf:

gnome-terminal --tab -e 'bash -c "printf \"\e]2;My Fancy Title\a\"; bash -i"'

To start a terminal window with 2 tabs, one running top, and one with a title, using echo:

gnome-terminal \
--tab -e 'bash -c "echo -ne \"\033]0;my tab running top\007\"; top"' \
--tab -e 'bash -c "echo -ne \"\033]0;My Fancy Title\007\"; bash -i"'

This does at least offer an option for setting the terminal title at runtime.

See this post for an option to put a simple function in your ~/.bashrc to allow for setting and resetting the title at will.

I don't know if you're still running into this issue, but I found my problem was I was running /bin/zsh as a custom command in my terminal profile. Disabling that fixed the issue for me - and still kept zsh as my primary shell.