Adding graphic elements to your scripts with Zenity and KDialog

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Article from Issue 99/2009
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Zenity and KDialog let you integrate your scripts with the native KDE or Gnome environment.

A full-blown GUI-based application is beautiful to behold, but a graphical interface is way more trouble to create than a simple shell script. If you like the simplicity of scripting, but you prefer a little more visual feedback, Zenity (for Gnome environments) and KDialog (for KDE) are a pair of tools you should know about. These handy helpers let you integrate graphic dialog boxes into your scripts.

Dialog boxes prompt users for input, display output, or just report progress on a process. Zenity and KDialog also output error messages and general status information in the form of visual feedback, and you'll never need to type pathnames painstakingly; instead, you can use a graphical file browser.

Zenity [1] is included by default with the Gnome desktop in openSUSE, Ubuntu, and several other distros. KDialog is often installed with the default KDE environment. If your distribution does not include these tools, install the kde4-dialog or zenity package to get started. If you write scripts for other people, the computers that run those scripts will also need Zenity or KDialog. It is a good idea to incorporate a test into your script that checks for the presence of Zenity or KDialog before invoking their commands.

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