Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi there,

I have progress bars in several of my scripts, they work by deleting what has already been writen out, using:

clear = "\\010"*( length of string i want to delete )
clearCmd = "echo -ne \""+clear+"\""
os.system(clearCmd)

I then re-write the percent done & the progress bar.

in this way you can effectively create an animation, but only on one line.

if the teminal window is to small causeing the progressbar to run onto the next line, then the delete does not work, it will only go to the begining of the line it is on.

is there any way to move the curser up? allowing me to write over previous output on multiple lines?

any help would be most apriceated.

The are many utilities out there that will do what you want. A lot of them are executables rather than shell scripts. Here is one for example

Command Line Progress Bar

Hi.

Perhaps you should consider scaling to prevent going past one line, so if you have an 80 character line, and are marking progress on 200 events, print a marker every 200 / 78 -> 3 events, producing a maximum of 67 characters.

If you don't know the number of events ahead of time, then a different display is needed, such as an actual count, followed by however many markers can fit on a line to give the idea of progress, erasing and repeating as necessary to prevent going to the next line ... cheers, drl

yes - these are good answers,
but my question was not well explained i guess.

this is not a problem with the progress bars as they are, I actualy want to display more than one line, and be able to change them.

Prehaps it is not possible, but i was hopeing someone would know of an "curser up" command or bodge.

H.

I would look at tput for control of the terminal. You can use that in a shell script.

For more complex operations, there is the ncurses library. I think you'll need something along the lines of perl, python, or c for that ... cheers, drl