Dear all,

I love to make shell scripts and I have written some useful scripts for personal usage. I like to add simple GUI to my scripts. I know that there is gtkdialog. Is not there anything else to make nice GUI for shell scripts ? I have heard about TCl/TK but have no idea about making GUI with this tool. Even I have not found any tutorial to do the same with TCL/TK. Could any one kindly suggest me about the availability of a tool to make GUI for shell scripts or how to use TCL/TK for the same ?

I know visual bash is there BUT I am not interested to use it as it is based on KDE where my system is non KDE.

Please enlighten me. Thanks

If all you want to do is make dialog boxes, consider zenity. This is quite a flexible tool, although limited to dialog-type tasks.

If you want to implement a more completed GUI, it's going to get more complicated. Tk is a fairly easy-to-use GUI toolkit, and has bindings to several languages. Probably the easiest to work with (if you don't already know one of the alternatives) it TCL. TCL is a nice little language - there is not a lot of syntax to learn, and it turns out to be quite expressive. Using Tk from a TCL program is what is referred to with the name TCL/Tk.

If you install Tk, you will get a program called wish, which is a TCL interpretter with the Tk features available. The Tk package in Ubuntu comes with a whole bundle of examples, which you can read and learn from. Of you use another distro, YMMV.

For example, I find the file /usr/share/doc/tk8.4/examples/widget, and can launch it like this:
This is a demo program which will launch all the other demo programs, and show you the code.

Note that the syntax of TCL is not the same as shellscript - it is a different language. Also note that Tk doesn't tend to look as nice as a lot of other GUI toolkits.

Thanks for your response. Just making dialog boxes is not my motto. I need a tool which can GUI-fy the shell script. I have no idea about TCL/TK. Is it possible to make a GUI interface of shell script using TCL/TK ?
thanks

Not really, you have to write your program in TCL. There are also bindings for Tk to Perl and Python.