The output of an application started from the window manager goes to the same place as the output from the window manager itself. (Unless the application redirects it, but typical GUI applications don't.)
You can find out where the WM's output goes by looking at what it has open on file descriptor 1 (standard output) and file descriptor 2 (standard error); typically both will go to the same file. Find out the process ID of your window manager (try e.g. pgrep metacity
or pidof metacity
if Metacity is your window manager — if you don't know the process name for your window manager, look at the root of one of the process trees reported by ps f
or pstree
). Supposing the process ID of your window manager is 1234, run
lsof -p1234
and look for the lines corresponding to file descriptors 1 and 2, or
or
ls -l /proc/1234/fd
You can automate the filtering of the relevant file descriptors:
lsof -p1234 | awk '$4 ~ /^[12][^0-9]/'
ls -l /proc/1234/fd/[12]
(Note: all the commands above are for Linux. pgrep
is common among other unices, and lsof
can be installed pretty much anywhere; ps
options and /proc
contents are different across different unices.)
In the common situation where you're running commands from a shell running in a terminal emulator (xterm, konsole, gnome-terminal, etc., but not when used across screen or tmux), then you can easily check where the terminal emulator's output is going, as the terminal emulator is the parent process of your shell. This doesn't work if the terminal emulator is running with additional privileges, which happens on some systems to allow the terminal emulator to write to the logged-in user list (utmp).
lsof -p$PPID
ls -l /proc/$PPID/fd
Many distributions direct the output of the X session to ~/.xsession-errors
.
Best Answer
I don't know about gnome-terminal specifically, but you can place the standard xterm with a specific columns and rows size like this:
That's an 80 column, 24-line xterm, with the northwest corder at (50, 100). I believe X11 does it's coords in (x,y) where the upper left corner of the screen is (0,0) and coordinates get bigger to the right and down.