No Zen With Zenity

The idea of incorporating Zenity into my Bash scripts has been on my mind for some time. Having pop-up boxes to prompt for input or to enter a password, or display a warning or an error message, is intriguing. I can think of situation where having a file selector or a graphicl progress bar would be handy. I do have at least a couple of scrlpts in which such things could be very useful.

I’ve come across a lot of online articles and YouTube videos discussing and demonstrating Zenity and similar tools, but what I’ve seen tends to talk about them as individual, one-off tools, not as any kind of integrated system. I see the potential usefulness of these tools, but pop-up boxes seem kind of random, maybe even distracting. I can easily write a prompt, a warning, or an error message, even add color to make it stand out, without having to add extra code to put into a GUI box.

I’m looking to integrate them into a cohesive, integrated workflow. For instance, I have a script that takes an ISO file and its associated checksum file, compares them, shows the progress, and reports the results. The script is completely text based. It would be nice if I could bring up a tool to select the input files, show the progress of the comparison, and display the results. I also have a script to select an ISO file and a USB drive to write it to using the dd command. I’d like to have a simple graphical tool to select the file and the device, write the file to the device, ideally while showing the progress of the operation, and showing success or failure. I’m sure it wouldn’t be very difficult.