How can I open terminal and run command automatically?

Question

I'm in the terminal emulator. I want to open another terminal to run a specified command.

gnome-terminal -e "zsh -c 'pwd; zsh;'"

That runs pwd and zsh consecutively and successfully in another terminal. After pwd terminates, zsh launches and I can run other commands in that second terminal instance.

However, when a different app is launched instead of pwd, I can't end that long-running program properly.

For example when I type CtrlC to exit from node.js server in below command, it also closes the terminal. It seems that SIGINT is passed to first zsh with -c option.

gnome-terminal -e "zsh -c 'node server.js; zsh;'"

How can I fix this?

Answer 1

I tried this in bash

Apologies in advanced if it does not work.

I wrote a bash script named userInput.sh - this waits for user input and ends.

`

## trap ctrl-c and call ctrl_c()

trap ctrl_c INT

function ctrl_c() {

echo "** Trapped CTRL-C"

exit
}

read -p "Press any key to continue... " -n1 -s 

Now, when I run and press clt+c

gnome-terminal -e "bash -c './userInput.sh; bash;'"

userInput.sh exits and I still have the bash prompt.

Now I think in your case instead of waiting for user input, you are running node server.js like

## trap ctrl-c and call ctrl_c()

trap ctrl_c INT

function ctrl_c() {

echo "** Trapped CTRL-C"

exit
}

node server.js

Let's assume that you named the script 'runNodeJs.sh', then command would be

gnome-terminal -e "bash -c './runNodeJs.sh; bash;'"