How to show a GUI message box from a bash script in linux?
Solution 1:
If you are using Ubuntu many distros the notify-send command will throw one of those nice perishable notifications in the top right corner. Like so:
notify-send "My name is bash and I rock da house"
B.e.a.utiful!
Solution 2:
I believe Zenity will do what you want. It's specifically designed for displaying GTK dialogs from the command line, and it's available as an Ubuntu package.
Solution 3:
Everyone mentions zenity, there seem to be many others. A mixed up but interesting list is at http://alternativeto.net/software/zenity/
First, an example of zenity featuring text formatting markup, window title, button label.
zenity \
--info \
--text="<span size=\"xx-large\">Time is $(date +%Hh%M).</span>\n\nGet your <b>coffee</b>." \
--title="Coffee time" \
--ok-label="Sip"
gxmessage
gxmessage "my text"
xmessage
xmessage is very old so it is stable and probably available in all distributions that use X (since it's distributed with X). It is customizable through X resources, for those that have been using Linux or Unix for long enough to know what it means (.Xdefaults, anyone ?).
xmessage -buttons Ok:0,"Not sure":1,Cancel:2 -default Ok -nearmouse "Is xmessage enough for the job ?" -timeout 10
kdialog (KDE tool)
kdialog --error "Some error occurred"
In a PPA
YAD: Zenity On Steroids [Display Graphical Dialogs From Shell Scripts] ~ Web Upd8: Ubuntu / Linux blog. Does not seem to auto-size dialogs.
echo My text | yad \
--text-info \
--width=400 \
--height=200
An bigger example
yad \
--title="Desktop entry editor" \
--text="Simple desktop entry editor" \
--form \
--field="Type:CB" \
--field="Name" \
--field="Generic name" \
--field="Comment" \
--field="Command:FL" \
--field="Icon" \
--field="In terminal:CHK" \
--field="Startup notify:CHK" "Application" "Name" "Generic name" "This is the comment" "/usr/bin/yad" "yad" FALSE TRUE \
--button="WebUpd8:2" \
--button="gtk-ok:0" \
--button="gtk-cancel:1"
Others not in Ubuntu standard repositories
- shellgui
- xdialog
- gtkdialog
Off-topic (for terminal)
whiptail --msgbox "my text" 10 20
dialog --msgbox "my text" 10 20
Feel free to edit.
Solution 4:
The zenity application appears to be what you are looking for.
To take input from zenity, you can specify a variable and have the output of zenity --entry saved to it. It looks something like this:
my_variable=$(zenity --entry)
If you look at the value in my_variable now, it will be whatever was typed in the zenity pop up entry dialog.
If you want to give some sort of prompt as to what the user (or you) should enter in the dialog, add the --text switch with the label that you want. It looks something like this:
my_variable=$(zenity --entry --text="What's my variable:")
Zenity has lot of other nice options that are for specific tasks, so you might want to check those out as well with zenity --help. One example is the --calendar option that let's you select a date from a graphical calendar.
my_date=$(zenity --calendar)
Which gives a nicely formatted date based on what the user clicked on:
echo ${my_date}
gives:
08/05/2009
There are also options for slider selectors, errors, lists and so on.
Hope this helps.