Opening windowed apps from a console

rrandrews · 10-03-2007, 10:23 AM

Simple question: say I'm working in a terminal window and I want to launch a windowed application (a text editor or something)--is there a way I can do that without it tying up that session?

rrandrews · 10-03-2007, 10:28 AM

Found the answer in the similar threads list below!

Silly Querstion RE: Opening apps from console

weibullguy · 10-03-2007, 10:31 AM

You mean that after you launch the GUI app, you return to a command prompt in the terminal? If that's what you mean, launch your GUI app (or any other) with a single ampersand (&) following the name. For example, to launch gedit and return to the prompt

Code:

127 files in /home/weibullguy
weibullguy@weibullone for 98D10h33m $ gedit &
127 files in /home/weibullguy
weibullguy@weibullone for 98D10h33m $

I'm too slow...

matthewg42 · 10-03-2007, 10:44 AM

If you want to launch or from that tereminal, just put it in the background like this:

Code:

firefox &

You may find that the GUI app prints a load of ugly stuff to the terminal as it runs, so it might be a nice idea to re-direct that the /dev/null:

Code:

firefox > /dev/null 2>&1 &

.
You will find that many (although by no means all) GUI programs which are running in the background of your terminal will die when the terminal closes. To prevent this you can use nohup. You don't need to redirect the output in this case as nohup does it for you:

Code:

nohup firefox &

.

rrandrews · 10-03-2007, 10:48 AM

Thanks to you both!