using a sleep() would be useless

I just put the sleep in there for testing purposes, i.e. to emulate a script doing something that takes time... (if the script doesn't do anything, the terminal would of course also close immediately)

I still wonder what's happening in your case.  The "normal" thing for a terminal would be to wait until the command it runs has finished...

What happens on your system when you try

for (1..3) {
    system("gnome-terminal -e 'sleep 2'");
}
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