gnome-terminal lockup when launched from desktop launcher

[dp]

Binary package hint: gnome-terminal

Create a launcher on the desktop by right clicking on "Create Launcher" and including the following:
     Type: Application
     Name: foo
     Command: gnome-terminal -e "ls -Fla"

Then click OK

Double click on the newly-created desktop 'foo' icon. If gnome-terminal closes right away, manually launch a gnome-terminal window from the Applications|Accessories|Terminal menu and make sure that the default profile for gnome-terminal has the following selected in the pull-down menu under the Commands section of the "Editing Profile Default" "Title and Command" Tab:

     "When the command exits: Hold the terminal open"

You should see either an empty gnome-terminal window without any of the "ls -Fla" output displayed, a window with partial output of the "ls -Fla" output displayed (and frozen mid-'ls'), or if you're very lucky, you may see a gnome-terminal window with the entire output that you'd expect to see. If that's the case, modify the launcher to 'ls' other directories, and you should start to soon see unexpected behaviour. Also try launching a 'hello world' script file (e.g. gnome-terminal -e "/home/user/hello.sh") and you should see that it doesn't output your 'hello world' as expected.

This bug may impact any scripts linked to launchers.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for your bug report. Please try to obtain a backtrace of the hang http://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingProgramCrash and attach the file to the bug report. This will greatly help us in tracking down your problem.

[dp (dave-memorylink)]

Having never done a backtrace before, its unclear how I would go about backtracing a program launched from a launcher. Is there a command-line way of launching a “foo.desktop” object? If so, what is it? Knowing this will allow me to do the following.

Start the program under control of gdb:

gdb <program> 2>&1 | tee gdb-<program>.txt
(gdb) handle SIG33 pass nostop noprint
(gdb) set pagination 0
(gdb) run <arguments, if any>

Or, is there a GUI way of starting backtrace before double-clicking on a launcher?

[Jaya Ballard (jaya-ballard)]

I have the problem also:

if it can help:
After editing the "When the command exits: Hold the terminal open"

you can run this command from an existing gnome-terminal to reproduce the problem:
gnome-terminal -e "ls -altr" (I get the the blinking cursor and no prompt)

if you type

gnome-terminal -x "ls -altr" (I got "There was an error creating the child process for this terminal")

I noticed that editing Preferred Applications has an influence on this behaviour

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

right, there's no crash the terminal just closes

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find.