CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++ubuntu
user3974005
user3974005

Reputation:

How do I open a terminal window with C++ in Ubuntu?

I recently decided to start teaching myself C++ and thought a simple encryption project would be a good place to start, since it covers most of the basics (cout, cin, opening files, etc). Is there a way to have the code open a terminal window similar to the one opened when I compile and run from sublime text?

I have tried this so far, but it hasn't changed anything.

    string cmd = "gnome-terminal-x sh-c 'ls-l; exec bash'";
    system(cmd.c_str());

Essentially, I would like to be able to run the program by clicking the .exe, and have the terminal where all of the input and output goes pop up.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 6851

Answers (2)

hyde
hyde

Reputation: 62906

Problem seems to be gnome-terminal, or then just my failure to give it the right arguments. For example gnome-terminal -x sh -c 'ls -l ; exec bash' from command line in another terminal just opens an empty gnome-terminal and spits out a bunch of glib warnings to original terminal... (Note to readers: if you can give the right command that works for gnome-terminal, please let me know in comments or just edit this paragraph.)

However, using xterm works, for example xterm -e sh -c 'ls -l; exec bash', or a line for your code:

string cmd = "xterm -e sh -c 'ls -l; exec bash'";

As a side note, the command to open the default x terminal window of the DE is x-terminal-emulator, but it quite often has the practical problem of different terminals taking different arguments, so sadly you're probably better of using a specific terminal, like that xterm, and requiring that to be installed, or letting user to configure what terminal to use, with what arguments (though letting user to specify any command to be run can also be a security risk, if user is not always trusted).

Just be very careful with escaping. For example, when you test the command form command line, and then copy-paste it to C++ string literal, you need to escape every " and \ one more time for C++. If you have trouble with this, check out C++11 raw strings.

Escaping becomes extra important if you construct the command string at runtime, and especially if you accept user input and add that to the string. In that case, better search for and use some existing library like GLib, or sanitize the user input very carefully (ie. just paranoidically reject anything with chars, which may have a special meaning in shell in some context).

If you are actually asking, how can my program open a console window for itself similar to how Windows console programs behave, and redirect it's own stdin, stdout and stderr there, as if it was launched from command line, that that is not very easy from the same binary, and it is not commonly done like that in Unix.

If you want a behaviour like that, you could create a desktop shortcut, but more general way is to write a wrapper shell script, which starts your binary in a terminal. What kind of script exactly, depends on how you want it to behave exactly: what will it do with stdio, will it return or wait for program to exit, how do you want it to find the binary, how does it behave when run from command line instead of double-clicking from GUI, etc.

Upvotes: 2

John Zwinck
John Zwinck

Reputation: 249612

You don't need to write any code, you just need to configure the shortcut to launch the program in a terminal. Here's a Gnome dialog that shows that option:

Gnome shortcut properties dialog box

Upvotes: 2

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