Open gnome terminal programmatically and execute commands after bashrc was executed

Question

For starting my dev environment I wrote a little script. One part is to open a gnome terminal with several tabs where automatically some commands should be executed. Some of those commands depend on an already executed .bashrc. But when using

gnome-terminal --tab -e "command" --tab --tab

the command is executed before .bashrc was executed. Is there a possibility to make an automated gnome-terminal -e behave like a manually used one? (even commands like "cd /foo/bar" do not work with gnome-terminal -e)

Answer 1

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?.

Answer 2

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.