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I'm working on a Bash script for massive USB flash memory testing (using f3 under the hood). I need to display a table-like interface with multiple columns and cells.

Currently I'm using printf with and it looks like this:

I have a separate function running for each drive that write out text to a log file. These log files are parsed to display the information to the user.

As you can see some rows have offsets that shouldn't be there but I can't get rid of them It doesn't seem to be caused by long strings being printed. I don't know what's this.

Another problems I have is the refresh time and the need to manually clear and redraw the whole screen at times, due to ocasional stderr messages appearing there from grep or cat when some files don't read properly.

I'm currently doing a partial rewrite of this script and I what I could od better in regard to printing out the data on the screen. I thought about looking into ncurses but that seems like a bit too complicated thing and would probably make things way to complex for me to maintain.

I wonder if there is a way for me to dump the echo or print commands to a text file and then execute that all at once to basically have a text "backbuffer" so my refresh can be more consistent and faster?

I would also want to be able to listen for user's keystrokes and react to that in the background but that's not a priority.

Maybe there's a better way to do this kind of thing in Bash, that I don't know of?

You could use tput to move the cursor around, for example tput cup 0 0; echo test will put write "test" to the top left of the screen.

Alternatively, if you wanted to use a buffered approach, you could dump lines to a file, clear the screen and cat the file:

# In program setup

TEMPFILE=$(mktemp) # Create temporary file

trap "rm -f $TEMPFILE" EXIT # Remove temporary on exit



# Main lopp

while true

do

  echo "TEST" >$TEMPFILE # Clear file and set first line with >

  date >>$TEMPFILE # Append lines to file with >>



  clear # Clear the screen

  cat $TEMPFILE # Dump the file

  sleep 1 # Just for testing to avoid high CPU

done

Comment out the trap line if you want to leave the temporary file behind for debugging.

I think you have nearly achieved what you set out to do, albeit with a few minor bugs and possibly some performance problems. Personally, I would first try to solve the bugs, then try to understand where the performance could be improved. However regarding your refresh rate, even programs like top or watch usually run with a refresh every 2 or 1 seconds and this is usually sufficient. You don't say, what rate you are trying to achieve.

There is a similar Stackexchange question, which has two answers/suggestions,

1. Use the program dialog which is something else to learn.


2. Shows the creation of bash functions, to clear, reset, write text at a position on the screen, which is a similar set of functions that you would probably use in ncurses, but has the advantage of using echo (a bash built in function) so it doesn't bear the overhead of running /usr/bin/printf to format the output.

Taking your problems in turn.

1. errors being printed from background commands.
   Redirect, stderr either to /dev/null if you just want to discard it or to a file for later processing.




2. Columns bug, show your code, input data nd required output, then we can make suggestions. This bug might be an affect of bug #1, so solve #1 first then address this if it still exists.




3. Performance, (edit your question) and add your code so that we can see what you are doing and make suggestions.

The other way is to use a different script interpreter, there are so many which to choose depends on which ones you are familiar with. (awk, python, perl, other shells, ...). However if you were not going to use ncurses, the principle would be similar to the bash function definitions shown in the 2nd answer above.