Practical uses of the Zenity dialog box

I frequent the forums in my country a lot… and honestly, it is rare to find something interesting. However, in one of those forums, there is a user who has made two interesting posts about Linux, and this is the first one (which I want to share with you):

Practical uses of the Zenity dialog box

Zenity is a set of graphical dialog boxes that gtk libraries use, with this program we can enter data, select a list of tasks, show us the information resulting from a given process, allow us to make an interruption before or during a certain process, among others functions.

Zenity consists of around 13 graphical dialog boxes, let's see what these are and their possible combinations:

1- To show us a calendar and select a desired date (this date will be shown in numerical format once selected):

zenity --calendar

2- To enter text (very useful when requesting data or the name of a file)

zenity --entry

Combine them correctly so that it asks us for the data to enter

zenity --entry --text "Escriba el nombre del archivo"

3- To inform us that an error has occurred

zenity --error --text "Imposible continuar"

4- To select a file

zenity --file-selection $HOME

Adding this option allows us to select several files:
--multiple

With this you will select only the folders
--directory

With this instead of selecting we will be activating the save option
--save

With this we will prevent an existing file from being overwritten:
--confirm-overwrite

5- Show us certain information

zenity --info *text "Información a mostrar"

6- Show us a list of options and select one or a group of these:
zenity --list --column "nombre de columna" "opcion1" "opción2" "opción3" "opción4"

Now what happens if we want to have a list of actions for certain files, but we want the name of the action to be performed to be displayed. To achieve this we have to use these two options (–hide-column value and * print-column value) it would look like this:

zenity --hide-column 2 --print-column 2 --list --column "nombre de columna" --column "columna oculta" "nombre1" "comando1" "nombre2" "comando2"

If we want to select more than one action at a time, we must add these two options
Text that will separate the chosen sequence from the other (in this case we add this »» which means a space
--separator=" "

And the option that will allow us to select more than one action at a time
--multiple

7- Show us a notification in the menu bar

zenity *notification *text "Texto deseado"

8- Show us the progress of a given process:
zenity --progress --pulsate

9- With this it will show us a question and we can choose whether or not we want to continue with the process:

zenity --question --text "Desea Continuar"

10 With this we can receive the result of a sequence in the console such as the list of a file search, help queries, among others:

zenity --text-info zenity --help-all | zenity --text-info

11 This can inform us that the process has been interrupted.

zenity --warning --text "El proceso ha fallado" ls /media/carpeta || zenity --warning --text "No existe el directorio"

12 With this we can select a given number by means of a slider bar:

zenity --scale

By adding this option we can define the minimum value:
--value 60 --min-value 60
(the –value option should never be less than * min-value)

With this we select the maximum value
--max-value 100

13 With this it will show us a dialog box with which we can select a desired color and take the color from the other side with the so-called color selector dropper.
zenity --color-selection --show-palette

After seeing which are the dialog boxes available in this program, let's see some practical examples with these:

- Let's see how we can mix the text input dialog box
using a script:

#!/bin/bash

#Darle a una palabra una secuencia de comandos.

archivo="`zenity --entry --text "Escriba el nombre del archivo"`"

#comando para renombrar

mv "$@" "`dirname "$@"`"/"$archivo"

- Let's see how to combine the dialog box number 12 of numerical scales:
(This is a simple script to lower the quality of the jpg images and thus reduce the space it occupies on our disks)

#!/bin/bash

#Darle a una palabra una secuencia de comandos.

foto="`zenity --scale --value 80 --min-value 60 --max-value 100`"

#comando para comprimir la imagen

mogrify -compress jpeg -quality "$foto%" "$@"

- Let's see another example where we will use the color selector dialog box where we will add a frame of the color that we select to a photo:

#!/bin/bash

#Darle a una palabra una secuencia de comandos.

foto="`zenity --color-selection --show-palette`" marco="`zenity --entry --text "Seleccione el rango deseado 6x6"`"

#comando para agregarle el marco

mogrify -border $marco -bordercolor $foto "$@"

- Let's see an example with the error messages dialog box:

#!/bin/bash

rm "$@" || zenity --error --text "Imposible de eliminar esto es una carpeta"

As you can see, if someone tries to delete a folder, the process returns an error so the chain continues thanks to these || operators.

- Let's see now what we can do with the dialog box number 6, selecting the actions that we will perform on a certain file:

#!/bin/bash

actions="`zenity --multiple --separator="" --hide-column 2 --print-column 2 --list --column "nombre de columna" --column "columna oculta" "comprimir un 80%" " -compress jpeg -quality 80%" "Cambiar tamaño a 800x600" " -resize 800x600"`"

#Comando

mogrify$actions "$@"

Note that there is a space in the command box since it does not allow the text to start with a hyphen, therefore the delimiter in this case has to be null –separator = »».

- Let's see another example with the progress dialog box

#!/bin/bash

#Script para eliminar

zenity --question --text "Desea borrara las imágenes dentro de esta carpeta `basename "$@"`" && find "$@" -name *.jpg -delete | zenity --list --progress * pulsate

... Well this is it.

I hope I can bring you more posts that are interesting.

regards