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 NETBSD

clear

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

NAME

     tput, clear -- terminal capability interface

SYNOPSIS

     tput [-T term] attribute [attribute-args] ...

DESCRIPTION

     tput makes terminal-dependent information available to users or shell applications.  The options are as follows:

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

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

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

     The following special attributes are available:

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

     init	   Initialize the terminal (the terminfo(5) ``is2'' sequence).

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

     reset	   Reset the terminal (the terminfo(5) ``rs1, rs2, rs3'' and ``rf'' sequence).

EXIT STATUS

     The exit status of tput is based on the last attribute specified.	If the attribute is of type string or of type integer, tput exits 0 if the
     attribute is defined for this terminal type and 1 if it is not.  If the attribute is of type boolean, tput exits 0 if the terminal has this
     attribute, and 1 if it does not.  tput exits 2 if any error occurred.

EXAMPLES

     tput cl cm 5 10	clear the screen and goto line 5 column 10

     tput cm 6 11 DC 6	goto line 6 column 11 and delete 6 characters

SEE ALSO

     termcap(3), termcap(5)

HISTORY

     The tput command appears in 4.4BSD.

BUGS

     tput can't really distinguish between different types of attributes.

     Not all terminfo entries contain the reset sequence, so using the init sequence may be more useful.

BSD
								September 29, 2009							       BSD