HowtoMatrix

The first time I played with Zenity, I recognized several potential uses for it. While I’m pretty comfortable with interacting with computers with a command line interface, I know many people are not. Zenity creates GUI widgets from a simple command line and can be used from any shell script. This allows an Administrator to write a shell script that performs a given function but make the program easy for less sophisticated users to interact with.

There are many times when you need to perform a repetitive task but you don’t want to expose your users to the shell prompt. As much as I don’t like having to point at things with a mouse in order to get a computer to do what I want, I understand that sometimes, using a GUI can reduce the chance of making a simple mistake. For example, if a program needs the user to enter a date, does it want the date in YYYY-MM-DD format, or MM-DD-YY format? Your program could tell the user how it expects the date,, but why make things more complicated than they need to be? Why not simply let the user select the date from an interface they are familiar with, a calendar? When was the last time you mistyped a long filename that that had mixed upper and lower case characters? Obviously, it would be easier to point and click on the filename instead.
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