How do you display Regional Status Indicators (things like country flags) in the Linux Terminal? Is this even possible?
I'm programming a VPN client and would like to include some flags for the countries the client includes. For example, I would like to display the Japan flag (๐ฏ๐ต). I pasted the two Unicode symbols ๐ฏ and ๐ต next to each other in a Bash script, but upon running the script in the Terminal, I just got the two symbols next to each other (they didn't "merge"). For example purposes I have part of the file below (note there is a space between the symbols so they don't "merge" in the browser, the space is not there in the real script).
#!/bin/bash
echo "Please choose a server:"
echo -e "๐ฏ ๐ต Japan (1)" # in the real script there is no space here.
echo -e "..."
read -p "> " choice
...
And upon running:
$ ./script.sh
Please choose a server:
๐ฏ ๐ต Japan (1) [ with no space in between ]
...
I understand the concept of Regional Status Indicators, but my question is if it's possible to use them in the terminal.
Edit: I noted that some answerers were having trouble understanding my problem, so I provided a screenshot of what my terminal looks like when I run this script.
Not sure if you copied the correct byte sequences, but you can simply use the correct escapes instead:
$ echo -e "\U1f1ef\U1f1f5 Japan (1)"
๐ฏ๐ต Japan (1)
It may also be an issue with your terminal understanding the Unicode sequence and rendering it properly, rather than a problem with your script.
Related
TL;DR?
How can I change every instance of one character (e.g. 'E') in a terminal window to another string of characters (e.g. '~E'), moving all other characters along in the window in the process? So:
abcdEfghij
becomes:
abcd~Efghij
This should work in the gnome-terminal and work with whatever output is on that terminal, from whatever program. Ideally it will be a script or other program I can run within that terminal emulator.
The context
I am using a Braille display (the Canute 360) with a Braille screen-reader (brltty), which at present does not support capital letters. They show up in Braille the same as lower-case letters. Until this is developed for BRLTTY I sometimes need to be able to force showing which letters are capitalised in order for me to, for example, write code.
The proposed solution
N.B. The below proposed solution is not intended to be elegant; it is a quick and dirty way of letting me and other Braille-using developers continue to program with this display for our work until the proper solution is forthcoming in the screen-reader proper.
I am trying to essentially 'wrap' the output of the terminal emulator (in this case gnome-terminal to force a certain character in front of every capital letter so on the Braille display it can be identified. I am going to assume that character is tilde (~). I am not concerned about this breaking vertical alignment, or forcing the line off the edge of the display. I am assuming a 40 character wide terminal (width of the Canute).
So this normal output:
$ echo ${string}
A Quick Brown Fox
Jumps over the lazy
Dog. Etc.
$
Becomes this:
$ echo ${string}
~A ~Quick ~Brown ~Fox
~Jumps over the lazy
~Dog. ~Etc.
$
That would then be viewable on the Canute (in US Computer Braille) as this:
$ echo ${string}
~a ~quick ~brown ~fox
~jumps over the lazy
~dog. ~etc.
$
It is fine for this to be a command that has to be called first, like screen. So:
$ caps-hack
$ nano
[doing my thing, then quit nano]
$
[ctrl-x to quit caps-hack]
$
Or alternatively it could launch a new terminal window, or it could be tied to specific TUI applications (like nano). I will primarily be using it for working inside vi, nano, micro and other editors, so if it cannot capture all terminal output the solution is still valuable.
Example use case: Micro/nano text editor
When I need to see capitals whilst editing text using micro or nano I would first launch caps-hack, then I could use the TUI editor, exit it, be back on the terminal, then cancel caps-hack if I wanted to revert to usual behaviour.
This is what nano normally looks like:
GNU nano 4.8 New Buffer Modified
This is a nonsense file for
Stackoverflow.
^G Get Hel^O Write O^W Where I^K Cut Tex
^X Exit ^R Read Fi^\ Replace^U Paste T
I'm looking for a solution that would then make it look like this:
~G~N~U nano 4.8 ~New ~Buffer ~Modi
~This is a nonsense file for
~Stackoverflow.
^~G Get ~Hel^~O ~Write ~O^~W ~Where ~I^~
^~X ~Exit ^~R ~Read ~Fi^\ ~Replace^~U
(Note that I have cut it off at 40 characters.)
The effect would be the same (inserting tildes, cutting off at 40 characters) whether I was in the terminal itself, in mc, or watching a ping stream.
This active use case means that so far as I can see I cannot simply pipe the output of programs to a bash script (like the one below), as that wouldn't work with a TUI. So I cannot do: $ nano myfile.txt | caps-hack
What I have tried so far
I have not worked out how to essentially capture the output, modify it and write it back to the terminal window. However I have the following shell snippet which I believe could be used for it, if I know where to put it.
# Repeat for all visible lines in the terminal
moddedline1=$( echo ${originalLine1} | sed -E -e 's/\([A-Z]\)/~\1/g' )
moddedline1="${moddedline1:0:40}"
tput cup 1 0 && printf "${moddedline1}"
I don't know if the problem I'm experiencing is actually a bad "interpretation" but I think I'm doing something wrong in my bash script.
I have the bash script below:
echo "Enter your name"
read name
#debug
echo "foo.hello('$name')"
python -c "import foo; foo.hello('$name')"
It reads a string (with spaces) then it passes the string to a Python function. It works almost every time.
Sometimes, it happens something odd. E.g.,
$ Enter your name
Max Aspir
foo.hello('Max As๏ฟฝpir')
It seems like there is new character between the 's' and the 'p' and it makes the python script fail.
Surprisingly enough, if I try to reproduce the error, it does not happen. I do not understand why (i) it does happen and (ii) why it does not happen every time.
Is there a way to fix?
This is likely a bug in your environment or a hardware issue with your keyboard, producing this random character. A colleague had a similar problem with his keyboard once causing the source files he touched to not compile.
If you face this problem again, try and capture or identify exactly which character is being inserted as that can provide some clues.
Other than this guess, I think this question is impossible to solve without more details.
I can not preproduce this with e.g. Cyrillic input
$ bash zz
Enter your name
ัััััั
foo.hello('ัััััั')
ัััััั
Script:
echo "Enter your name"
read name
echo "foo.hello('$name')"
python -c "print('$name')"
When i try to set my terminal window title:
$ echo -n "\033]0;foo\007"
\033]0;foo\007
It just print plain text, the terminal title had no change. How to fix it?
You're missing the -e to echo which tells it to interpret backslash escape sequences. Try this:
$ echo -en "\033]0;foo\007"
Although #chris-page is correct about -n being non-standard, the bash builtin echo and the system /bin/echo both support -n. However, the system echo does not support -e which is the real import feature when trying to send those escape codes to the terminal.
Also be aware that the system wide /etc/bashrc sets PROMPT_COMMAND to the function update_terminal_cwd, which is defined as:
update_terminal_cwd() {
# Identify the directory using a "file:" scheme URL,
# including the host name to disambiguate local vs.
# remote connections. Percent-escape spaces.
local SEARCH=' '
local REPLACE='%20'
local PWD_URL="file://$HOSTNAME${PWD//$SEARCH/$REPLACE}"
printf '\e]7;%s\a' "$PWD_URL"
}
And apparently the operating system code 7 for Apple's Terminal.app sets a special icon link to the current working directory. You can right click on the folder icon in the title bar to open Finder at that location. This code also modifies the title bar title a bit by prepending the last component of the current working directory.
I've been investigating how Terminal.app's tab titles vs title bar title are set. And apparently they follow along with xterm's pretty well, where 'icon name' is the tab title, and 'window title' is the title bar title.
The title bar title is whatever you set with osc-2 (or osc-0). If the extra path component is set by osc-7 it will be prepended to the title bar title. And if any components are checked in Preferences->Settings->Window, they will be appended to the title bar title.
The tab title is whatever you set with osc-1 (or osc-0). If that is unset, it will be the contents of the Title box of Preferences->Settings->Window with the active process name appended. If the title is exactly Terminal (whether set by the text box in preferences or by osc-1) the tab title will just be the active process name.
Bashโs built-in echo command no longerโ supports the -n option, because itโs not a POSIX option. Instead, use the printf command to send control characters: printf '\033]0;foo\007โ.
In general, itโs better practice to use printf for consistent results instead of echo for anything more complicated than printing strings with ASCII graphic characters, because POSIX echo is fairly simple and any extended behaviors may vary between shells.
โ I donโt recall exactly which OS version it changed, but itโs unsupported in 10.8.
I am a newbie to unix scripting, I want to do following and I have little clue how to proceed.
I want to log the input and output of certain set of commands, given on the terminal, to a trace file. I should be able to switch it on and off.
E.g.
switch trace on
user:echo Hello World
user:Hello World
switch trace off
Then the trace log file, e.g. trace.log, it's content should be
echo Hello World
Hello World
One thing that I can think to do is to use set -x, redirecting its output to some file, but couldn't find a way to do that. I did man set, or man -x but I found no entry. Maybe I am being too naive, but some guidance will be very helpful.
I am using bash shell.
See script(1), "make typescript of terminal session". To start a new transcript in file xyz: script xyz. To add on to an existing transcript in file xyz: script -a xyz.
There will be a few overhead lines, like Script started on ... and Script done on ... which you could use awk or sed to filter out on printout. The -t switch allows a realtime playback.
I think there might have been a recent question regarding how to display a transcript in less, and although I can't find it, this question and this one address some of the same issues of viewing a file that contains control characters. (Captured transcripts often contain ANSI control sequences and usually contain Returns as well as Linefeeds.)
Update 1 A Perl program script-declutter is available to remove special characters from script logs.
The program is about 45 lines of code found near the middle of the link. Save those lines of code in a file called script-declutter, in a subdirectory that's on your PATH (for example, $HOME/bin if that's on your search path, else (eg) /usr/local/bin) and make the file executable. After that, a command like
script-declutter typescript > out
will remove most special characters from file typescript,
while directing the result to file out.
I'm trying to write a script that contains this
screen -S demo -d -m which should start a new screen session named demo and detach it.
Putting screen -S demo -d -m in the command line works.
If I put it in a file named boot.sh, and run it ./boot.sh I get
Error: Unknown option m
Why does this work in the command line but not as a shell script?
This file was transferred from windows and had ctrl-M characters.
Running "screen" on my Linux machine, a bad option (Screen version 4.00.03jw4 (FAU) 2-May-06) gives the error,
Error: Unknown option -z"
while your description includes no dash before the offending option. I'd check that the characters in your script file are what you expect them to be. There are many characters that look like a dash but which are not.
cat -v boot.sh
may show something interesting as it'll show codes for non-ascii characters.
This may seem a little like the "make sure your printer is plugged in" kind of help, but anyway:
have you tried to check if the screen you're invoking from the script is the same as the one invoked from the command line ?
I'm thinking you may change the PATH variable inside your script somewhere and perhaps screen from the script would be something else (a different version, perhaps ?).