One for the Guild of Linux ( Bash related question )

ally_uk · February 2015

Evening all

or should I say morning it's 3.31 am here lol couldn't sleep :P

Anyways working on a Bash script and I am trying to get the text to output in bold! now this may be something trivial to you guys but for the life of me I cannot get the flipping thing to work.

So at the start of my script I have the following variable declared.

bold="\033[1m"
normal="\033[0m"
greentext="\033[32m"

And at the start of the script I have:

echo -e $bold "Quick System report for "$greentext"$HOSTNAME"normal

But the code doesn't output bold text, I looked briefly online and somewhere mentioned something about tput? I tried that aswell but that didn't work please help me almighty gurus

DoubleNNs · February 2015

I'm no guru - I'm actually a beginner myself. However, I just tried it on a Solaris box and it worked flawlessly. The only thing I had to change was adding the $ sign in front of the "normal" variable. Do you have another typo somewhere else in your script?

#!/bin/bash -

bold="\033[1m"
normal="\033[0m"
greentext="\033[32m"

echo -e $bold "Quick System report for "$greentext"$HOSTNAME"$normal

Question: What does the -e option for echo do?

ally_uk · February 2015

I will give it a shot

and will report back it was kinda late when I was tinkering.

The -e option for echo enables interpretation of backslash characters, Maybe somebody can explain that part a bit better im also
a noob when it comes to scripting.The example code I posted originally is from a tutorial video I am following unless the tutor is doing
things weird and is making typos with code hence why it didnt work initially.

DoubleNNs · February 2015

Got it to work?

ally_uk · February 2015

No it doesn't work I think it may be a virtual machine issue. Can you try running the code virtually and see what happens?

DoubleNNs · February 2015

Your VM should function just like a regular system.

What distro are you using? Did you try copying and pasting my script above directly?

Trytyping the following commands on your VM and see whether they work:

$ tput bold
$ tput sgr0

brownwrap · February 2015

Am I missing something. I have CenTOS on my notebook:

[gcr@wireless-host-22-151 ~]$ vi test-script
[gcr@wireless-host-22-151 ~]$ chmod +x test-script
[gcr@wireless-host-22-151 ~]$ ./test-script
Quick System report for localhost.localdomain
[gcr@wireless-host-22-151 ~]$

I copied your code into test-script and it ran. Doesn't show here, but 'Quick System report' came out in bold, the rest in green

ally_uk · February 2015

Yeah sorry about the delay guys, I finally got it to work for some reason if you run Centos virtually without a gui it doesn't invoke the bold setting

I have since ran it on a desktop and it works fine, Probably works if you remote in the virtual machine with SSH but havent gone that far.

One for the Guild of Linux ( Bash related question )

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