I really want to make a bashrc function that I can call from the Gnome Terminal that will cd into a directory, then enter a distrobox container, then enter a conda environment, then launch a python script. (doing AI stuff and have many coexisting dependencies), I want a function because I would like to pass arguments to alter all 3 levels.
The distrobox “-- commands” doesn’t seem to work for this. Like these commands do not launch inside the terminal that called distrobox. I need the output of these commands in the original terminal, and I need the visual confirmation that each command has run correctly like the conda (env)user$ I typically get for running conda activate and the PS1 changes I have setup for each distrobox container. How can I run a bash function/script that emulates the behavior of the Gnome Terminal when a user enters each of these commands sequentially?
It sounds like your main problem is that distrobox somehow eats up the output of the commands run in it? Maybe you are missing some other switch then.
I am assuming the
--commandsswitch does actually run the commands, but does not show the outputs.Usually when distrobox takes over the terminal as you describe it, it could be boiled down to “taking over” the terminal’s stdin, stdout and stderr which your GUI terminal app/emulator thenr renders out. (What actually probably happens is that distrobox calls
docker runwith-itswitches which allocate a pseudo-TTY, basically another terminal - keep in mind these terminals or ttys in other words, are not the same as [usually] graphical terminal emulators).I started looking into this a few days ago but got nowhere. I think you are right about the pseudo terminal. I was thinking there must be a way to capture the ID of the original terminal and pass the distrobox commands back to it. Maybe it would be possible by passing the distrobox container a variable at launch and making that variable a named pipe, but like, I barely know named pipes are a thing and didn’t manage to get it working using a script or function call in the distroboxrc file. I tried making a bunch of different things in this file, like making a startup loop to launch stuff, but none of them worked either.