Hi,

If I open a gui application via the menu is it possible to subsequently display a terminal window for this application?

i.e. I have just opened unison-gtk from the menu and I am scanning 2 directories. I'd really like to now open up a terminal to see the messages being output. It'd be very cool if I could even see the commands being executed (such as pressing the left to right button would show what terminal command would achieve the same).

I figure it'll be a helpful learning tool for myself, for any application have the option to display a terminal window, somehow, to see what's going on behind the prettiful GUI

Cheers,
Matt

Matt, as far as I know there's no application available which show you the excution process of an application in terminal, at the same time when appln. is running in GUI.
On terminal you can see the corressponding process running for that appln., but not the execution process.
For your learning, instead of launching the application from GUI, you can run that same appln. on command line in verbose or interactive mode to see the processing, but this is limited and practically not so uesful.

Matt, I understand where you're coming from; I've played with the idea of writing some applications for system maintenance that will display which files are actually modified when you save a configuration; e.g. for networking.

It never materialized.

Another example, I'd like to see the apt-get commands that correspond to actions done in Synaptic...

man apt will tell you all you want to know about apt and some things you probably don't.

A much friendlier presentation of the information is here:

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-...eat-sheet.html

They explain it far better than I can.

---------- Post added 2013-01-07 at 22:16 ----------

man apt will tell you all you want to know about apt and some things you probably don't.

A much friendlier presentation of the information is here:

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-...eat-sheet.html

They explain it far better than I can.

The problem here would be that Synaptic does not launch apt-get at all, it is directly corresponding with the package management system, using libapt for this purpose.