The above code is just an example of printing on the same line, hit Ctrl + C to stop When using echo -ne "something\r", echo will: - print "something" - dont print a new line (-n) - interpret \r as carriage return, going back to the start of the line (-e) Remember to print some white spaces after the output if your command will print lines of different sizes, mainly if one line will be smaller than the previous Edit from reading comments: You can achieve the same effect using printf (more standardized than echo): while true; do printf "%-80s\r" "$(date)"; sleep 1; done

64 elements max on 16 rows, 4 cols. GNU Barcode will adapt automagically the width and the eight of your elements to fill the page. Standard output format is PostScript.

man -t manpagename gives a postscript version of said man page. You then pipe it to ls, and assuming you have cups set up, it prints in your default printer. Show Sample Output

tr has some predefined sets of characters that are more convenient to use than characters codes

Use this like the cat command with the additional feature to strip out unprintable characters from the input, newlines will stay. Show Sample Output

Tail is much faster than sed, awk because it doesn't check for regular expressions. Show Sample Output