Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a function to center output in a terminal. However It only works for variables. I would like to center the output of the command 'cal' or 'cal -3' in a terminal.

I have tried:To no avail, but the closest I've got is this:

Code:

cal | sed  -e :a -e 's/^.\{1,77\}$/ & /;ta'

which still messes up the last line | week, and only works for a preset terminal width ($COLUMNS=79)

Here is my function center ()

Code:

	function center ()

	{
     
		VALUE=${#1}

		if [[ $VALUE -lt $COLUMNS ]] ; then

			WIDTH=$(( (  $COLUMNS - ${#VALUE} ) ))
			printf "%*s\n" $(( ( (WIDTH + ${#1}) / 2 ) + 1 )) $"$1"

		else

			echo "$1"

		fi

	}

How can I make `cal` be centered in terminal regardless of xterm width?

Have a look at man tput

Hi AlphaLexman,

Your 'sed' line could be useful, using the environment variable $COLUMNS and single quotes:

Code:

cal | sed  -e :a -e "s/^.\{1,$COLUMNS\}$/ & /;ta"

Regards,
Birei

@ Scutinizer: Hey thanks for the quick reply, I know that the variable $COLUMNS does not work in a script, it does work in a function. COLS=$(tput cols) will give the same value as $COLUMNS.

---------- Post updated at 03:55 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:48 PM ----------

@ birei: Your code was very similar to my 'sed' command, except it seemed to be double spaced, and the last line | week was still centered and not under the day of week!

FYI: I am on Fedora 13 with bash 4.1.7

Try:

Code:

center() {
  while IFS= read -r line
  do
    printf "%$(((COLUMNS+${#line})/2))s\n" "$line"
  done
}
cal|center

That was still on the left side of the terminal, Thanks, though!

Do you mean a little bit to the left or all the way to the left?