"Zenity is not a unique tool (it’s similar to
dialog and Xdialog etc.) and not the first of its kind either, but
it is very usable. The FSF directory page says that “Zenity
lets you display Gtk+ dialog boxes from the command line and
through shell scripts” and I can find no better way of
summarising it. Put another way though, Zenity allows a shell
script to interact with a GUI user in a mutually beneficial way.
Sometimes your shell script needs to ask the user a question:
Zenity gives them a familiar dialog window and accepts the answer
accordingly. The end user need not even be aware that they are
running a shell script.
"Hello world!
As mentioned, you can put shell commands into scripts to be
executed. The same applies the other way around. You can take a
script command and run it directly in the shell if you want. In the
case of Zenity this is less useful unless you are doing for testing
purposes though. To give a simple example in the standard fashion
this is how you would get Zenity to display an information dialog.
Assuming you have Zenity installed (it’s a package on most
GNU/Linux systems so just search for it in your usual
package/software manager), type this directly into a GUI terminal
emulator (xterm etc.) and see what you get:"