Question

I want to launch several applications using “./application_name” and each in separate terminal , how do i do that in bash script.

Answer 1

I am not sure I understand what you are asking for, but this is probably what you need:

x-terminal-emulator -e "./application_name [arguments]" &

This will start a new terminal emulator in the background which will be running the given command instead of a shell.

If you system does not have a x-terminal-emulator alias, substitute the name of an actual terminal emulator, like xterm or gnome-terminal. They (pretty much) all support the -e option.

Of course this requires that your bash script be running from inside an X11 session in the first place (not from a cron job or something like that), else there will be no $DISPLAY where the new terminal emulators can appear.

EDIT: Whether or not the argument to -e is executed under a shell or directly seems to depend on which terminal emulator is used. For example, xterm runs it under a shell but gnome-terminal doesn’t. The upshot of this is that you may or may not be able to supply compound shell commands like cd foobar; ./something & wait as the argument to -e. As a workaround for those terminal emulators that don’t run the command under a shell, you can use -e 'sh -c "actual command"'. Proper quoting of special characters gets gets complicated because you have two levels of quoting, but it can be done.