October 2009
Beginner to intermediate
242 pages
5h 4m
English
Content preview from Pro Bash Programming: Scripting the GNU/Linux Shell
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CHAPTER 14Scripting the Screen
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 on another.
On one system, the command to place the cursor at the 20th column on the 10th row is as follows:
tput cup 9 19
On another system, this is the command:
tput cm 19 9
These commands ...