I recently switched from Ubuntu 11.10 to Fedora 16 (with KDE). I'd researched and played with virtual machines of a few other distros before I settled on Fedora. However, one of the others--I think Mint--came preconfigured so that the terminal printed fortune inside of cowsay, and I wanted to try and recreate that.

So I opened Konsole's preferences menu and where you can type in a custom command for when Konsole starts up, I entered "fortune | cowsay -f tux". This would normally work well enough for what I wanted--except that Konsole was still set to exit immediately after the custom startup command closed. So now every time I try to open Konsole, it opens for a second and immediately closes again before I have the time to fix it. I still have xterm, so I'm not completely without a terminal, if/when I need it. Its relative lack of configurability has apparently saved my dumb ****.

Aren't the Konsole profile/preferences saved as a text file somewhere in the system directory? Could I fix startup settings that way, and how would I do that? Or is there a way to start Konsole in a new profile from the run dialog, or from xterm? Or will I have to just reinstall Konsole?

You should not not set this preference in Konsole. Revert that setting (probably you should set a shell program [bash, dash, zhs, etc.]). Then, add "fortune | cowsay -f tux" to your shell init/config script. For example, for the bash shell it is the .bashrc file.

That is not what that configuration in konsole is for. That configuration allows you to enter a different shell than your default shell. For instance you could launch directly into a ssh connection, a python interpreter, midnight commander, rsh if you use bash, etc. It is designed to launch the program you provide, let you use the program to do whatever you want, then close the interface automatically when you close the program you are using. But the key thing here is that it is intended for interactive applications, and cowsay is not interactive.

TheBlackCat wrote:That is not what that configuration in konsole is for. That configuration allows you to enter a different shell than your default shell...

Right. I've used it before to set up fish, and such. Lesson learned just a little too late, I guess.

Also, I finally found out where the profile file is:
~/.kde/share/apps/konsole/<profilename>.profile

Thanks anyway.