Color Underline and Bold letter in shell script Post: 302495963

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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Color Underline and Bold letter in shell script Post 302495963 by cjcox on Friday 11th of February 2011 04:48:29 PM

02-11-2011

Registered User

Terminals.. in the Unix sense... have capabilities. Even pseudo-terminal graphical clients.

The "right" answer is to properly query the terminal capabilities and use the data passed back as the "right" way to present terminal attributes.

For example.... doing bold=`tput bold` (or you use $()'s for ksh or bash) will get you the capabilities string for enabling BOLD on the terminal.

sgr=`tput sgr0` will give you the string for doing a capabilities reset.

So.. then, you can:

echo "The following is ${bold}BOLD${sgr}... see it?"

To get underline, smul=`tput smul`

Now... color is HARDER. Unless you limit your terminal choices. You can look at your terminal capabilities in total using "infocmp".. HOWEVER, that assumes you have a terminal definition that adequately covers your whole set of terminal capabilities (and... having done this for a LONG time... most DO NOT cover the whole set).

On ANSI like terminals, you can usually do tput setaf <number> to set a foreground color and tput setab <number> to set a background color... Setting the palette of colors is again a VERY terminal - to - terminal specific thing... sometimes it can be altered, sometimes not. Some terminals allow selection of colors using a longer syntax wherein color values can be given. Again, color is a "less" portable option.

The termcap and (now) terminfo way of handling terminal capabilities is a VERY good and generic way of dealing with multi-vendor devices. As with most all things Unix, the "standard" is to support them all!!!!

cjcox

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LEARN ABOUT FREEBSD

tput

TPUT(1) 						    BSD General Commands Manual 						   TPUT(1)

NAME

     tput, clear -- terminal capability interface

SYNOPSIS

     tput [-T term] attribute ...
     clear

DESCRIPTION

     The tput utility makes terminal-dependent information available to users or shell applications.  When invoked as the clear utility, the
     screen will be cleared as if
	   tput clear
     had been executed.  The options to tput are as follows:

     -T      The terminal name as specified in the termcap(5) database, for example, ``vt100'' or ``xterm''.  If not specified, tput retrieves the
	     ``TERM'' variable from the environment.

     The tput utility outputs a string for each attribute that is of type string; a number for each of type integer.  Otherwise, tput exits 0 if
     the terminal has the capability and 1 if it does not, without further action.

     If an attribute is of type string, and takes arguments (e.g. cursor movement, the termcap ``cm'' sequence) the arguments are taken from the
     command line immediately following the attribute.

     The following special attributes are available:

     clear	   Clear the screen (the termcap(5) ``cl'' sequence).

     init	   Initialize the terminal (the termcap(5) ``is'' sequence).

     longname	   Print the descriptive name of the user's terminal type.

     reset	   Reset the terminal (the termcap(5) ``rs'' sequence).

EXIT STATUS

     The exit status of tput is as follows:

     0	     If the last attribute attribute argument is of type string or integer, its value was successfully written to standard output.  If the
	     argument is of type boolean, the terminal has this attribute.

     1	     This terminal does not have the specified boolean attribute.

     2	     Usage error.

     3	     No information is available about the specified terminal type.

SEE ALSO

     termcap(5), terminfo(5)

STANDARDS

     The tput utility conforms to IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (``POSIX.1'').

HISTORY

     The tput utility appeared in 4.4BSD.

BUGS

     The tput utility cannot really distinguish between different types of attributes.

     Some termcap entries depend upon having a '%' in them that is just a '%' and nothing more.  Right now we just warn about them if they do not
     have a valid type declaration.  These warnings are sent to stderr.

BSD
								   June 15, 2002							       BSD