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.