Shell Programming and Scripting

hi all,
how do i change the colour of text if i am using printf ?? in my script i am printing out response times from the server and i wanted to print out the max response time in red.


ta.

The "right" way is to output the character sequence needed based on terminal type... thus you get the sequence from termcap/terminfo. Most systems will now use terminfo... you can use tput to output a capability string. You can use infocmp (if installed) to view the current terminfo database for your terminal type.

As far as "red" goes, that could vary. Often times you use the "tput setaf #" command to output a color by NUMBER. Red is often times color 1, so
tput setaf 1 would change the foreground to red. In a script you would capture the string to use in output (at least that's what I'd do). So if "tput setaf 1" means red foreground, and "tput sgr0" means reset graphics/charsets/color to nothing... then:

r=`tput setaf 1`
N=`tput sgr0`

echo "The following ${r}WORD${N} should be in red."

Or

printf "The following %sWORD%s should be in red.\n" $r $N


Because terminal type can vary, even from one terminal client to another, it's difficult to depend on things like color (especially color).