Shell Programming and Scripting

What is not working?

What command are you using?

What terminal or terminal emulator are you using?

In my opinion you should never embed control strings like "\e[1m" in your code or shell scripts. You are making
assumptions about the terminal which will be displaying the output. It is not portable and can lead to problems
on multi-byte codesets and legacy and specialized terminals.

If you want to be in complance with ISO 6429/ECMA-48, the correct control sequences are CSI SGR0 for default
output and CSI SGR1 for bold (increased intensity) output. See Section 8.3.117 (SGR - SELECT GRAPHIC
RENDITION) of either standard. In partical terms these translate to the terminfo capabilities "bold" for
bold and the capability "sgr0" for default.

It is more portable than the alternative, tput.

Terminals or terminal emulators which do not use ISO 6429/ECMA-48 are very rare.

The control sequence CSI SGR0 is "\e[0m".

but only in 7 bit encoding.
The standard defines it to be "\2330m" in 8 bit encoding. However, while both works fine with xterm, gnome-terminal is failing to properly interpret the latter even when configured to use UTF8 so IMHO sticking with "\e[0m" is more portable than strictly sticking to the ISO/ECMA standard and far better than relying to tput unless a very exotic terminal is used.

I could count on one hand the number of times I've wanted to use bold, and on fewer hands the number of times I've had to.

Whenver I have, the tput has worked just fine.

We're talking of standards, this and ISO the other, but I tried both on numerous terminal types (including xterm) in Linux, AIX and in Solaris.

The tput version works 100% of the time.

The \e[0m method works fine in Linux, but not in AIX or in Solaris.

If it's a "standard", why doesn't it work here?

Can you provide more context about the printf statement not working under AIX and especially Solaris ?
It certainly did work and still do for me with Solaris. In any case, the OS doesn't matter, what does is the terminal emulator you use.

Hi jlliagre.

I used PuTTY, Exceed and (also via Exceed) dtterm (through CDE (on AIX)).