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

The rest of answers are pretty good, but just wanted to add some extra information in case someone comes here looking for a solution to replace/update a multiline echo.

So I would like to share an example with you all. The following script was tried on a CentOS system and uses "timedatectl" command which basically prints some detailed time information of your system.

I decided to use that command as its output contains multiple lines and works perfectly for the example below:

#!/bin/bash
while true; do
  COMMAND=$(timedatectl) #Save command result in a var.
  echo "$COMMAND" #Print command result, including new lines.

  sleep 3 #Keep above's output on screen during 3 seconds before clearing it

  #Following code clears previously printed lines
  LINES=$(echo "$COMMAND" | wc -l) #Calculate number of lines for the output previously printed
  for (( i=1; i <= $(($LINES)); i++ ));do #For each line printed as a result of "timedatectl"
    tput cuu1 #Move cursor up by one line
    tput el #Clear the line
  done

done

The above will print the result of "timedatectl" forever and will replace the previous echo with updated results.

I have to mention that this code is only an example, but maybe not the best solution for you depending on your needs. A similar command that would do almost the same (at least visually) is "watch -n 3 timedatectl".

But that's a different story. :)

Hope that helps!