Gnome-Terminal, how to start in a different directory?

Question

If you start gnome-terminal like gnome-terminal --working-directory=myfolder it will start with the working directory at ~/myfolder so you could add a new entry to your menu to use that command instead of the other one.

I did this way - with script: open 3 tabs in the same window size 170x40, each "tab" starts in a different directory.

gnome-terminal --geometry=170x40 --working-directory=myfolder1 \

--tab --working-directory=myfolder2 \

--tab --working-directory=myfolder3 

Add the following to your ~/.bashrc

cd ~/myfolder

You could use the nautilus-open-terminal extension. This allows you to right-click on a folder in nautilus and open a terminal window with that directory as its working directory.

You can also run a terminal in the normal way, type "cd ", and drag a folder icon from nautilus to the window. This will paste the path of the folder into the command line and you then type return to change to that directory. You can do the same thing with regular files to paste their path and run commands on them.

Actually, this is how I turn it off for everyone by default.

gconftool-2 --direct \
--config-source xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.mandatory/ \
--set -- type=bool /apps/nautilus-open-terminal/desktop_opens_home_dir true

Directory option

There is the option --working-directory to specify the startup directory of the terminal (no short option form).

The basic approach to open the terminal in /some/dir is

gnome-terminal --working-directory=/some/dir

but there is a trap...

Bad trap

Assuming we want to start the terminal in the directory ~/dir.

This does not work:

gnome-terminal --working-directory=~/dir

The command looks perfectly fine according to the option syntax, but the terminal starts in the home directory.
It's because it does not expand the tilde (~), for confusing reasons - see below.

Thesse do work:

gnome-terminal --working-directory=/home/auser/dir

gnome-terminal --working-directory=$HOME/dir

gnome-terminal --working-directory ~/dir

Tilde expansion

Note there is no = in the last variant. Because of this, the ~ is at the start of a shell word, and therefore is handeled by tilde expansion.

The problem is that ~ does not get expanded everywhere, but only in certain places. One of them is in variable assignments, like directory=~/dir. That's ok, ~ gets expanded to $HOME, but --working-directory=~/dir does not expand ~, because that is not a variable assignment, it only looks very similar.

From GNOME Terminal - Getting Started:

You can also specify a command that runs automatically when you start GNOME Terminal in the profile.