Open gnome terminal programmatically and execute commands after bashrc was executed
Once gnome-terminal has started bash, it's out of the loop as far as command execution is concerned: it only manages the input and output. So you'll need bash's cooperation to run something after ~/.bashrc
has been loaded.
First, in many cases, you don't actually need to execute commands after ~/.bashrc
. For example, opening a terminal in a particular directory can simply be done with cd /foo/bar && gnome-terminal
. You can set environment variables in a similar way: VAR=value gnome-terminal
. (If your ~/.bashrc
overrides environment variables, you're doing it wrong: environment variable definitions belong in ~/.profile
)
To execute commands in the terminal, but before ~/.bashrc
, you can do
gnome-terminal -x sh -c 'command1; command2; exec bash'
If you want to use multiple tabs, you have to use -e
instead of -x
. Gnome-terminal unhelpfully splits the argument of -e
at spaces rather than executing it through a shell. Nonetheless, you can write a shell command if you make sure not to include spaces in it. At least with gnome-terminal 2.26, you can use tabs, though (replace <TAB>
by a literal tab character):
gnome-terminal -e 'sh -c command1;command2;exec<TAB>bash'
gnome-terminal --tab -e 'sh -c command1;<TAB>exec<TAB>bash' \
--tab -e 'sh -c command2;<TAB>exec<TAB>bash'
If you do need to run commands after ~/.bashrc
, make it run the commands. For example, include the following code at the end of ~/.bashrc
:
eval "$BASH_POST_RC"
Then to run a some code after (really, at the end of) your bashrc:
gnome-terminal -x sh -c BASH_POST_RC=\''command1; command2'\''; exec bash'
or (less heavy on the quoting)
BASH_POST_RC='command1; command2' gnome-terminal
Although I don't particularly recommend doing it this way, you may be interested in the techniques mentioned in How to start a terminal with certain text already input on the command-line?.
When you use the -e
option the gnome-terminal
will run that command without starting a new shell (you can even run something like: gnome-terminal -e gedit
), so if you want to run a command into the bash
shell into a new terminal/tab you have to do something like this:
gnome-terminal -x bash -c "command"
But note that when "command"
ends the terminal/tab will end too.