A bash script I wrote and love

I, like many Linux geeks before me, love to use the terminal for just about everything. However when I need to use programs with GUIs (Firefox, amarok, okular, etc), I wanted to execute them silently and to get them to return focus to the terminal. Normally if you type

$ firefox

You get a bunch of X and Gtk warnings during execution of Firefox, and you can't use that shell anymore. You have to open another tab in konsole. So, this script I wrote is called "sex" for "silent execute." Mainly for the brevity and the humor of having

$ sex dolphin

be a valid command. This script also allows parameters to be sent correctly to an executable, so

$ sex okular A\ document\ with\ spaces.pdf

opens "A document with spaces.pdf" in okular correctly.

#!/bin/sh
CONCAT="${1}"; shift
for ARG in "$@"; do
  CONCAT="${CONCAT} \"${ARG}\""
done
eval "$CONCAT >> /dev/null 2>&1 &"

Simply put this in /usr/bin/sex (need root) and do a chmod +x /usr/bin/sex. I recommend adding

alias ff='sex firefox'

to your ~/.bashrc or your /etc/bash.bashrc too. It's a nice shortcut.