Unix Tip: PROGRESS STATUS IN XTERM TITLEBAR

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Unix Tip 3440 - July 11, 2011

http://www.ugu.com/sui/ugu/show?tip.today

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PROGRESS STATUS IN XTERM TITLEBAR

Sometimes it is handy to be able
to show some information in the
xterms title bar, for example
if you download a set of large
files (thereby producing lots
of meaningless information on
the terminal) and you want to
know which file is actually
beeing downloaded.

For this purpose, I hacked a few
lines of shell code that would
put any information into the
xterms title bar. I called the
script ttshow.

#!/bin/sh
if [ -z $DISPLAY ]; then
echo "ESC]0; $* ^G"
fi

In this little script, the
string ESC has to be replaced
by one real escape character
(ascii 0x1b), the string "^G"
has to be replaced by a bel
character (ascii 0x07).

Now I can make my scripts like
this:

for file in in `cat filenames`; do
ttshow "downloading $file"
wget $file
done

..and it will tell me on the
first glance what it's doing.

For more information about
this, unpack the X distribution
and search for the file
ctlseqs.ms - this file belongs
to the xterm distribution and
contains all the escape
sequences xterm knows about.

This tip generously supported
by: ulinzen+ugu@sendmail.com

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