Reading terminal cursor position from the shell ?

by Frank Hofman » Fri, 16 Jan 1998 04:00:00

Hello,
subject line says it all:
I want to read the current cursor position (vt100 terminal) into
the shell. vt100 reports it when I do
echo -e '\e[6n'
but its output seemingly goes to the tty only and not to the
shell's stdin.
Is there any way to read this back from within the shell ?
How ?

Thanks ahead for any answers.

Frank

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1. : reading cursor position on vt100 terminal

Hi folks,

I've got a (seemingly) simple question.
How do I read back the current cursor position from a VT100-compatible
terminal using shell commands ?
Note: I'm using bash.
I can do the following
echo -en '\e[6n'; read
and I get the correct string into $REPLY (\e[<col>;<row>R), but ONLY after
I pressed <Enter>.
But can this be done automatically ?
I've tried
stty min 5 time 10
to make the read timeout after 1 second, but it doesn't work, I still have
to press the <Enter> key or it will wait indefinitely.

what's wrong here ?
Can this be done without writing a special C program for it ?

Thanks for any answers,
Bye,

--
Frank Hofmann Telefon: [(0049)931 888] 5876
Sysadmin CIP-Pool Physik Zimmer: C 060
Find out more: http://cip.physik.uni-wuerzburg.de/~hofmann/

I will not say: Do not weep, for not all tears are an evil.

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