How do you delete characters in a shell script?

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03-30-2010

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How do you delete characters in a shell script?

I have printed a character on the screen using a shell script. I want to move that character one space to the left. I have tried moving the cursor to the top left corner of the screen and printing a backspace, like this:

Code:

tput cup 1 1;
printf "\b";

The backspace supposedly deletes the character under the cursor. But it won't do anything for me.

Is there any other way to do this?

Last edited by Ultrix; 03-30-2010 at 10:59 AM..

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Code:

tput cup 0 0

Should this not be?

Code:

tput cup 0 1

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Yeah, I know. That doesn't really help, though.

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Rethink.
Move the cursor back with \b , output a space character, move the cursor back with \b .

Code:

printf "line1"
printf "\b \b"
read junk

Last edited by methyl; 03-30-2010 at 12:40 PM..

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Quote:

Originally Posted by Ultrix

The backspace supposedly deletes the character under the cursor. But it won't do anything for me.

Backspace is not deleting any character, it just moves the cursor one position to the left. To erase a character, overwrite it with a space.

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If you use same tput more than once with some constant argument(s) then do tput once and save output.
After that use variable.

Code:

lear
cat <<EOF
=========================================================
Screen test


EOF
loc0_0=$(tput cup 0 0)
bold=$(tput  smso)
boldoff=$(tput rmso)
save_loc=$(tput sc)
ret_loc=$(tput rc)

# after this init, use variable
echo "${bold}BoldText${boldoff} and not so bold"
echo -e "(Look line 1) Ask here:${save_loc}${loc0_0}LOCATION 0,0 IS HERE ***************${ret_loc}\c"
read answer
echo "${save_loc}${loc0_0}Your answer:$answer   ${ret_loc}"
echo

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