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Zenity – Creates Graphical (GTK+) Dialog Boxesin Command-line and Shell Scripts

By Avishek Kumar Under: Bash Shell, Open Source

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GNU Linux, the operating system built on very powerful Linux is famous for its command Line operations. With the invent of Linux inday-to-day and Desktop computing, nix remains no more biased towardscommand-Line, it is equally Graphical and developing Graphical application

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remains no more a difficult task.

Zenity Display Graphical Boxes

Here in this article we will be discussing creation and execution of simpleGraphical Dialog box using GTK+ application called “

What is Zenity?

Zenity is an open source and a cross-platform application which displays Dialog Boxes in command-line and using shell scripts. It allows to ask andpresent information to/from shell in Graphical Boxes. The application lets youcreate Graphical dialog boxes in command-line and makes the interactionbetween user and shell very easy.

There are other alternatives, but nothing compares to the simplicity of specially when you don’t need complex programming. Zenity, a tool you musthave your hands on.

Zenity Features




FOSS Software1.Cross Platform Application2.Allow GTK+ Dialog Box Execution3.Command Line Tool4.Support in Shell Scripting5.

Usefulness

Easy GUI Creation1.Less features than other complex Tools2.Enables shell scripts to interact with a GUI users3.Simple dialog creation is possible for graphical user interaction4.

Since Zenity is available for all known major platforms, and based on GTK+library, Zenity program can be ported to/from another platform.

Installation of Zenity in Linux

Zentity is by default installed or available in repository of most of the StandardLinux distribution of today. You can check if is installed onto your machine or notby executing following commands.

ravisaive@tecmint:~$ zenity --version

3.8.0

ravisaive@tecmint:~$ whereis zenity

zenity: /usr/bin/zenity /usr/bin/X11/zenity /usr/share/zenity /usr/share/man/man1/zenity.1.gz

If it’s not installed, you can install it using command as shown below.

ravisaive@tecmint:~$ sudo apt-get install zenity [on

root@tecmint:~# yum install zenity [on

Moreover you can also build it from the source files, download the latest source package (i.e. current version 3.8

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/zenity/1.

Zenity Basic Dialog Boxes

Some of the basic Dialogs of Zenity, which can be invoked directly from thecommand-line.

1. How about a quick calendar dialog?




root@tecmint:~# zenity --calendar

Calendar Dialog

2. An error Dialog Box

root@tecmint:~# zenity --error




Error Dialog

3. A General text Entry Dialog Box

root@tecmint:~# zenity --entry

Entry Dialog

4. An Information Dialog

root@tecmint:~# zenity --info




Info Dialog

5. A question Dialog box

root@tecmint:~# zenity --question




Question Box

6. A progress Bar

root@tecmint:~# zenity --progress

Progress Bar

7. Scale Dialog

root@tecmint:~# zenity --scale




Scale Box

8. A Password Dialog

root@tecmint:~# zenity --password




Password Box

9. A Form Dialog box

root@tecmint:~# zenity --forms

Forms

10. An about Dialog

root@tecmint:~# zenity --about Stay updated. Follow us onfacebook.



About Zenity

Create Shell Script Dialog

Now we would be discussing Zenity Dialog creation using simple shell scriptshere. Although we can create single Dialog by executing Zenity commandsdirectly from the shell (as we did above) but then we can’t link two Dialog boxesin order to obtain some meaningful result.

How about an interactive dialog box which takes input from you, and shows theresult.

#!/bin/bash first=$(zenity --title="Your's First Name" --text "What is your first name?" --entry) zenity --info --title="Welcome" --text="Mr./Ms. $first" last=$(zenity --title="Your's Last Name" --text "$first what is your last name?" --entry) zenity --info --title="Nice Meeting You" --text="Mr./Ms. $first $last"

Save it to ‘anything.sh‘ (conventionally) and do not forget to make it executable.Set 755 permission on anything.sh file and run the script.

root@tecmint:~# chmod 755 anything.sh root@tecmint:~# sh anything.sh




Enter Your First Name

Welcome Dialog




Enter Your Last Name

Welcome Message

About Script Description




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The conventional shebang aka hashbang

#!/bin/bash

In the below line ‘first’ is a variable and the value of variable is Generated at runtime.

‘–entry‘ means zenity is asked to generate an text Entry box.1.‘– title=‘ defines the title of generated text box.2.‘—text=‘ defines the text that is available on text Entry box.3.

first=$(zenity --title="Your's First Name" --text "What is your first name?" --entry)

This line of the below script file is for generation of Information (–info) Dialogbox, with title “Welcome” and Text “Mr./Ms.first”

zenity --info --title="Welcome" --text="Mr./Ms. $first"

This Line of the script is Similar to line number two of the script except here anew variable ‘last’ is defined.

last=$(zenity --title="Your's Last Name" --text "$first what is your last name?" --entry)

This last line of the script is again similar to the third line of the script and itgenerates information Dialog box which contains both the variables ‘$first’ and‘$last’.

zenity --info --title="Nice Meeting You" --text="Mr./Ms. $first $last"

For more information on how to create custom dialog boxes using shell script,visit at following reference page Zenity.

https://help.gnome.org/users/zenity/stable/1.

In the next article we would be integrating user interaction. Till then stay tuned and connected to give your valuable feedback in comment section.

Avishek Kumar

I am a major in computer science, love to research nix. I love to

write codes and scripts, review distros, experiment Foss

Technologies, write technical articles, Hack, of course Ethically. I

am working as System Administrator (nix) for a NGO.




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One Response

Mahesh says:April 8, 2014 at 10:09 am

hey! I happen to find this blog today (apr 08, 2014) because of Tarunika’srsync article (http://www.tecmint.com/rsync-local-remote-file-synchronization-commands/). So, i continued browsing through your siteand found this article.

Just a few months back I wrote and published a simple show clock (date,time) shell script that uses Zenity. Please find it here:http://thatmaheshrs.wordpress.com/2014/02/09/show-date-and-time-in-xubuntu-as-well-as-other-linux-distros/

Please post your constructive comments, if any, onto my blog.

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