How to show and update echo on same line

Question

I have the following in Bash (In Linux)

for dir in Movies/*
do
  (cd \"$dir\" && pwd|cut -d \\/ -f5|tr -s \'\\n\' \', \' >> ../../movielist &am         


        

Answer 1

Well I did not read correctly the man echo page for this.

echo had 2 options that could do this if I added a 3rd escape character.

The 2 options are -n and -e.

-n will not output the trailing newline. So that saves me from going to a new line each time I echo something.

-e will allow me to interpret backslash escape symbols.

Guess what escape symbol I want to use for this: \r. Yes, carriage return would send me back to the start and it will visually look like I am updating on the same line.

So the echo line would look like this:

echo -ne "Movie $movies - $dir ADDED!"\\r

I had to escape the escape symbol so Bash would not kill it. that is why you see 2 \ symbols in there.

As mentioned by William, printf can also do similar (and even more extensive) tasks like this.

Answer 2

This is vary useful please try it and change as required.

#! bin/bash
for load in $(seq 1 100); do
    echo -ne "$load % downloded ...\r"
    sleep 1
done
echo "100"
echo "Loaded ..."

Answer 3

The rest of answers are pretty good, but just wanted to add some extra information in case someone comes here looking for a solution to replace/update a multiline echo.

So I would like to share an example with you all. The following script was tried on a CentOS system and uses "timedatectl" command which basically prints some detailed time information of your system.

I decided to use that command as its output contains multiple lines and works perfectly for the example below:

#!/bin/bash
while true; do
  COMMAND=$(timedatectl) #Save command result in a var.
  echo "$COMMAND" #Print command result, including new lines.

  sleep 3 #Keep above's output on screen during 3 seconds before clearing it

  #Following code clears previously printed lines
  LINES=$(echo "$COMMAND" | wc -l) #Calculate number of lines for the output previously printed
  for (( i=1; i <= $(($LINES)); i++ ));do #For each line printed as a result of "timedatectl"
    tput cuu1 #Move cursor up by one line
    tput el #Clear the line
  done

done

The above will print the result of "timedatectl" forever and will replace the previous echo with updated results.

I have to mention that this code is only an example, but maybe not the best solution for you depending on your needs. A similar command that would do almost the same (at least visually) is "watch -n 3 timedatectl".

But that's a different story. :)

Hope that helps!

Answer 4

My favorite way is called do the sleep to 50. here i variable need to be used inside echo statements.

for i in $(seq 1 50); do
  echo -ne "$i%\033[0K\r"
  sleep 50
done
echo "ended"

Answer 5

If I have understood well, you can get it replacing your echo with the following line:

echo -ne "Movie $movies - $dir ADDED! \033[0K\r"

Here is a small example that you can run to understand its behaviour:

#!/bin/bash
for pc in $(seq 1 100); do
    echo -ne "$pc%\033[0K\r"
    sleep 1
done
echo

Answer 6

You can try this.. My own version of it..

funcc() {
while true ; do 
for i in \| \/ \- \\ \| \/ \- \\; do 
  echo -n -e "\r$1  $i  "
sleep 0.5
done  
#echo -e "\r                                                                                      "
[ -f /tmp/print-stat ] && break 2
done
}

funcc "Checking Kubectl" & &>/dev/null
sleep 5
touch /tmp/print-stat
echo -e "\rPrint Success                  "