Carriage return for reprinting on the same line

while true; do echo -ne "$(date)\r"; sleep 1; done

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

By: polaco

2009-11-17 22:45:37

echo sleep echo printing clear

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What Others Think

Using terminfo here is better, IMO. Just using '\r' will not clear out junk characters on the end left by previous iterations of the loop. el1=$(tput el1); while true; do echo -ne "${el1}\r$(ps -eo %cpu,comm --sort %cpu|tail -1)"; sleep 1; done

arcege · 773 weeks and 6 days ago

Note that there are various implementations of the echo command, and not all of them support backslash codes. Also, many shells have a builtin echo command that behaves differently from /bin/echo. Therefore it is better to use printf which is standardized, so echo -ne $(date) becomes printf "%s\r" $(date) You can also easily get rid of the junk character problem that arcege mentioned: printf "%-79\r" $(date) Explanation: The "-" modifier will print the argument left-justified and overwrite the rest of the line with spaces. This assumes at least 80 characters per line, which should be more sufficient because the output from the date command is much shorter.

inof · 773 weeks and 5 days ago

That should be: printf "%s\r" "$(date)"

cfajohnson · 773 weeks and 4 days ago

Thanks for the additions guys, i edited the command

polaco · 773 weeks and 1 day ago

seofox · 136 weeks and 6 days ago

seofox · 136 weeks and 3 days ago

seofox · 136 weeks ago

rahimhh21 · 106 weeks and 4 days ago

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projack · 9 weeks and 6 days ago

What do you think?

Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?

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