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In various situations when using Bash or another shell, you may need to run a script or program in a new terminal instance or in another tab in the same terminal. Opening a new terminal instance or tab from within Terminal is simple; we'll explain it in enough detail with enough examples.

Use the gnome-terminal command to start a new terminal session in Bash

You have to start a new terminal from an already running instance using the simple command gnome-terminal. This will start a new terminal instance with a new window opened.

If you want to open a new terminal and run a program from an already running instance, there are a few different ways to accomplish this task.

gnome-terminal -x "complete/path/of/the/program" &

The command above will run the desired program in a new terminal; it is important to provide the full path to the program you want to run.

at the end of the command &moves this task to the background of the original terminal instance; not adding it at the end of the command &may cause errors because the program may try to run before the new terminal has been initialized.

The bash -c option can be used with the gnome-terminal command to execute multiple Bash commands in a new terminal.

The syntax of the gnome-terminal command is as follows.

gnome-terminal --command="bash -c '[cmd1]; [cmd2]; $SHELL'"

Here --command="bash -c" tells the new terminal that these are Bash commands or scripts, and cmd1 and cmd2 represent the names of the first and second commands respectively.

The $SHELL at the end of the command keeps the terminal open even after the command is completed.

An alternative syntax for the above example is:

gnome-terminal -x bash -c "<cmd>; exec bash"

The exec bash at the end of this command $SHELLserves the same purpose as (i.e., keeps the terminal open after executing the command).

Open a new tab in the same terminal in Bash

Sometimes you may not want to open multiple terminal windows because they are hard to keep track of. In this case, opening a new tab in the same terminal is a better approach.

The command to open a new terminal tab is:

gnome-terminal --tab

This can be used in conjunction with the examples discussed above to execute commands in a new terminal tab, for example:

gnome-terminal --tab -x bash -c "<cmd>; exec bash"

It should be noted that the above commands are for systems that support the GNOME environment.

For macOS, you can execute a command in a new terminal from an already running terminal using:

osascript -e 'tell app "Terminal" to do script "cmd"'

This will open a new terminal and execute the cmd command in the newly created terminal.