Programmatically open tab in gnome-terminal, execute command, and have tab stay open

If you have xdotool and wmctrl installed, then the following shell script might work:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

window="$(xdotool search --class gnome-terminal | head -1)"
xdotool windowfocus $window
xdotool key ctrl+shift+t
xdotool type "$*"
xdotool key Return

I use it like this:

$ run-in-new-tab 'ls -l'

I found this idea on Trustin Lee's blog.

Gnome-terminal can either execute a command or open a shell, but not both.

There is a workaround to do both by encapsulating the command and subsequent invocation of the shell into one command.

$ gnome-terminal -e "bash -c \"echo foo; echo bar; exec bash\""

For more alternatives read my answer to a similar question on stack overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3512055/avoid-gnome-terminal-close-after-script-execution/3531426#3531426

For me lesmana's answer didn't work for multiple tabs (at least with 3.28.2). So, I found a workaround:

gnome-terminal --tab [-t title1] -- bash -c "gnome-terminal --tab [-t title2] -- bash -c \"ls; exec bash\"; ls -a; exec bash"

This opens a tab and executes again a gnome-terminal command that opens a second tab and executes the second tab's command, comes back to first, executes the command meant for first tab.