Pro Bash: Learn to Script and Program the GNU/Linux Shell

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2023

J. VarmaPro Bash https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-9588-5_14

14. Scripting the Screen

Jayant Varma¹  

(1)

Berwick, VIC, Australia

 

Unix purists will shake their heads over this chapter. Traditionally, screen manipulation is done through the termcap or terminfo database that supplies the information necessary to manipulate any of dozens or even hundreds of types of terminals. The shell interface to the database is an external command, tput.

On some systems, tput uses the termcap database; on others (mostly newer systems), it uses the terminfo database. The commands for the two databases are not the same, so a tput command written for one system may not work ...