How to display and refresh multiple lines in bash

Question

I am writing a installation script and would like to display the status of the script as it progresses.

example:

var1=\"pending\"
var2=\"pending\"
va         


        

Answer 1

You can use the carriage return to change text on a single status line.

n=0
while true; do
  echo -n -e "n: $n\r"
  sleep 1
  n=$((n+1))
done

If you can put all your counters on one line

n=0
m=100
while true; do
  echo -n -e "n: $n  m: $m\r"
  sleep 1
  n=$((n+1))
  m=$((m-1))
done

This technique doesn't seem to scale to multiple lines, though it does have the benefit over tput that it works on dumb terminals (like Emacs shell).