Episode: 323
Title: HPR0323: zenity
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0323/hpr0323.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 16:20:23

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Hello, my name is Dave and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
This episode is coming to you from a parked Honda Civic in a shower of rain.
So I'm using an Olympus LS-10 handheld recorder without the headset.
So you may hear some ambient rain noise on the roof of the car, so just consider it
atmosphere, a little extra bonus for you there.
But in today's very brief episode of Hacker Public Radio, I want to talk about Zenity.
And if I'm not mistaken, Zenity is part of the standard GNOME desktop and Zenity is a program
that will display GTK Plus dialogues and return, either in return code or in standard output.
The user's input, and this allows you to present information and ask for information from
the user, and you can use this in your bash shell scripts.
So that's from the man page, I'm pretty sure, and it's a succinct description of what
the program would do.
What this means is, is that it's a way to add really quick in your shell scripts, in
one or two lines of code, the GTK Plus dialogues that will allow the user to click or to fill
in a blank or to select the file or anything like that.
So you want to find out more, you can just type man's entity, and you will see a very large
number of options, and stuff like dash dash question, or calendar, entry, error, file
dash selection, info, list, progress, title, and on most of these, you can then pass some
text to that option that, for instance, with title, you can define what you want the
title of the GTK Dialog, the window that pops up to be the progress, of course, is the
progress dialogue, file selection is the GTK Plus file selection dialogue, entry is, will
output, on standard output, with the user typed into the text entry field question, will
allow the user to select either cancel or yes, return code of one or zero respectively.
So what this allows you to do is to enhance your shell scripts very easily, very quickly,
with some GTK Plus dialogues.
So if you're not a full-blown programmer of graphical programs, this is a way to look
like one, or maybe just feel like one just a little bit, I don't know, I'm not a programmer,
but I do write shell scripts that I use every day, and I've not used this, I don't know
that I will use it, but some of you may.
If you want an example that's probably a far better explanation than I'm giving right
now of what Zenith can do, you can go to forms.devion.net, and I could give you the really long
ugly URL to a thread in that forum, but instead I will do the title URL version, title URL.com
forward slash D7XX5B, and in this thread you will see an 11 line, 12 if you count the
Shabang at the beginning, bash shell script that will run at get update.
Find out if there are any updates, if there are updates are more than zero, it will, uh,
with literally, you know, two lines of Zenith code are really one, and then, well, I guess
there's two lines of Zenith code in the middle of this 11 line bash script.
It will say, you know, it'll present to you, a GTK Plus dialogue window will pop up that
and say as there are this many, there are updates available, there are this many updates
available.
Do you want to update yes or no?
And depending on whether you click yes or no, it'll pass a return code, zero or one
in this case, and it will allow you to update your system, so, and you put down a crime
job.
So that's sort of cool.
Maybe you didn't know about Zenith, I didn't know about Zenith, I'm a flux box user,
I don't use GNOME that much, but I stumbled upon this and noticed it was part of GNOME,
and it seems relatively useful, so if you didn't know about it, there, now you do.
If it sounds useful, go use it.
If you didn't like this episode of Hacker Putter Radio, do something about it, get off
your lazy carcass and record your own.
Be a producer of content for Hacker Putter Radio, not just a consumer.
Until next, Hacker Putter Radio, episode, this is Dave signing off.