Zenity

Last updated
Zenity
Original author(s) Sun Microsystems
Developer(s) Glynn Foster
Lucas Rocha
Stable release
4.1.90 [1]   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg / 31 January 2025;5 months ago (31 January 2025)
Repository
Operating system Unix-like
License GNU Lesser General Public License
Website gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/zenity

Zenity is free software and a cross-platform program that allows the execution of GTK dialog boxes in command-line and shell scripts.

Contents

Description

Like tools such as whiptail and dialog, Zenity allows easy creation of GUIs, [2] though it has fewer features than more complex GUI-creation tools. [3]

Other scripting languages such as Perl and Python can be used to construct full-scale GUI applications, but the zenity program enables a shell script to interact with a GUI user.... [The] user interface is not as refined as one that could be provided by a full-featured GUI application, but it is perfectly suitable for simple interactions.

— Chris Tyler [4]

Cross-platform compatibility

As of 2012, Zenity is available for Linux, BSD and Windows. [5] A Zenity port to Mac OS X is available in MacPorts and Homebrew.

As of 2018, Zenity ports for Windows are available: zenity-windows (based on version 3.20.0) and winzenity (based on 3.8.0 / statically linked)

Zenity does not possess any built-in scripting capabilities and it must, therefore, rely on an interpreter for processing. It is found that for the creation of a script that runs on more than one platform without extensive modifications, it would be best to use an interpreter that is available on the widest range of operating systems. One option is Python in combination with the PyZenity library. [6]

Examples

Python example

A Zenity infobox as displayed on GNOME 3 (Please press a button).png 
fromPyZenityimportInfoMessagefromPyZenityimportQuestionfromPyZenityimportErrorMessagechoice=Question("Please press a button.")ifchoice:InfoMessage("You pressed Yes!")else:ErrorMessage("You pressed No!")

POSIX shell script example

#!/bin/shifzenity--question--text="Please press a button.";then zenity--info--text="You pressed Yes\!"else zenity--error--text="You pressed No\!"fi

Windows shell script example

@echo off zenity --question --ok-label="Yes" --cancel-label="No" --text="Please press a button."if%ERRORLEVEL%== 1 gotoerror zenity --info --text="You pressed Yes!"gotoend:error zenity --error --text="You pressed No!":end

See also

References

  1. ↑ "4.1.90 · Tags · GNOME / zenity · GitLab" . Retrieved 6 March 2025.
  2. ↑ Cartwright, Ryan (2009-01-30), "More fun with Zenity: shell script/GUI interactivity", Free Software Magazine , archived from the original on 2011-11-06, retrieved 2011-12-10
  3. ↑ Diehl, Mike (2008-05-12), "Make Your Scripts User Friendly with Zenity", LinuxJournal, archived from the original on 2011-11-26, retrieved 2011-12-10
  4. ↑ Tyler, Chris (2006), "Chapter 4. Basic System Management", Fedora Linux, O'Reilly Media, pp. 258–259, ISBN   978-0-596-52682-5, archived from the original on 2011-07-15, retrieved 2010-03-15
  5. ↑ Zenity for Windows, archived from the original on 2012-01-12, retrieved 2011-12-10
  6. ↑ Ramos, Brian (2011-04-20), PyZenity, archived from the original on 2013-10-07, retrieved 2012-11-15


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