Running Scripts from the Linux GUI: A Beginner’s Guide

2 min readMay 30, 2023

To run a script without having to open a terminal and type the command manually you need to create a GUI shortcut for the script. The GUI shortcuts are created using .desktop files.

.desktop files are a standard way of creating GUI shortcuts in these desktop environments.

Locating .destop files

.destop config files can be found at the following paths:

default applications: /usr/share/applications/
Third party applications: /usr/local/share/applications/
User specific applications: ~/.local/share/applications/

Creating a shell script

xdg-open 'https://app.slack.com/client/TV310986N/C02K2HJ249'
xdg-open 'https://housekeeping.comp.com/housekeeping/'
xdg-open 'https://webmail.comp.com/zimbra/#1'
xdg-open 'https://comp.atlassian.net/jira/software/c/projects/WBT/boards/75'
xdg-open 'https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/?tgff=d'

The above shell script opens my commonly used URLs in the default browser.

Creating the config file

Open the config files folder.

cd ~/.local/share/applications/

In our case, we will create a file in the user-specific applications folder.

vi work.desktop

add the below configs

[Desktop Entry]
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Name=Work
Exec=/home/badal/work.sh
Icon=/home/badal/Downloads/work.jpg

Name specifies the application's name.

Exec specifies the command to run when the application is launched.

Icon specifies the path to the icon file associated with the application.

Terminal indicates whether the application should be run in a terminal window. If set to true, the application will be launched in a terminal otherwise, it will run in the background.

Type parameter specifies the type of the entry. It can be specified as ‘Application’, ‘Link’, ‘Directory’, ‘Service’.

You can also add some other below params

StartupNotify determines whether the desktop environment should show a startup notification for the application.

Comment allows you to provide a description or additional information about the application.

Save and exit the file. This will add a shortcut to your Applications Menu.