utfout

Overview

utfout is a command-line tool that can produce UTF-8 (Unicode) strings in various ways and direct them to standard output, standard error or direct to the terminal without the need for shell support.

Strings can be repeated, delayed, randomly-generated, written to arbitrary file descriptors, interspersed with other characters and generated using ranges. printf(1)-style escape sequences are supported along with extended escape sequences. utfout(1) Sits somewhere between echo(1) and printf(1).

Examples

Here are some interesting examples of usage:

# Print "foofoofoo" to stderr, followed by "barbar" to stdout.
utfout "foo" -r 2 -o "bar" -r 1

# Write 50 nul bytes direct to the terminal.
utfout -t "" -r 49

# Write continuous stream of nul bytes direct to the terminal,
# 1 per second.
utfout -b 1s -t '' -r -1

# Display a greeting slowly (as a human might type)
utfout -b 20cs "Hello, $USER.\n"

# Display a "spinner" that loops 4 times.
utfout -b 20cs -p % "%r|%r/%r-%r\%r" -r 3

# Display all digits between zero and nine with a trailing
# newline.
utfout "\{0..9}\n"

# Display slowly the lower-case letters of the alphabet,
# backwards without a newline.
utfout -b 1ds "\{z..a}"

# Display upper-case 'ABC' with newline.
utfout '\u0041\u0042\u0043\n'

# Display 'foo' with newline.
utfout '\o146\u006f\x6F\n'

# Clear the screen.
utfout '\n' -r $LINES

# Write hello to stdout, stderr and the terminal.
utfout 'hello' -t -r 1 -e -r 1

# Display upper-case letters of the alphabet using octal
# notation, plus a newline.
utfout "\{\o101..\o132}"

# Display 'h.e.l.l.o.' followed by a newline.
utfout -a . "hello" -a '' "\n"

# Display upper-case and lower-case letters of the alphabet
# including the characters in-between, with a trailing newline.
utfout "\{A..z}\n"

# Display lower-case alphabet followed by reversed lower-case alphabet
# with the digits zero to nine, then nine to zero on the next line.
utfout "\{a..z}\{z..a}\n\{0..9}\{9..0}\n"

# Display lower-case Greek letters of the alphabet.
utfout "\{..}"

# Display cyrillic characters.
utfout "\{..}"

# Display all printable ASCII characters using hex range:
utfout "\{\x21..\x7e}"

# Display all printable ASCII characters using 2-byte UTF-8 range:
utfout "\{\u0021..\u007e}"

# Display all printable ASCII characters using 4-byte UTF-8 range:
utfout "\{\U00000021..\U0000007e}"

# Display all braille characters.
utfout "\{\u2800..\u28FF}"

# Display 'WARNING' in white on red background.
utfout '\e[37;41mWARNING\e[0m\n'

# Generate 10 random characters.
utfout '\g' -r 9

Extended Example

It's not exactly curses, but here's a simple routine to draw a rectangle:

$ cat >rectangle.sh<<EOT
#!/bin/sh

rectangle()
{
    height="$1"
    width="$2"
    char="$3"

    r=$((width - 1))
    utfout "$char" -r $r '\n'

    for i in $(seq $((height - 2)))
    do
        utfout "$char" ' ' -r $((r - 2)) "$char\n"
    done

    utfout "$char" -r $r '\n'
}

[ $# -ne 3 ] && echo "ERROR: need height, width, and a character"
rectangle "$1" "$2" "$3"
EOT
$ chmod 755 rectangle.sh
$ ./rectangle.sh 10 20 ☻
☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻
☻                  ☻
☻                  ☻
☻                  ☻
☻                  ☻
☻                  ☻
☻                  ☻
☻                  ☻
☻                  ☻
☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻
$

References

See http://ifdeflinux.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/out-output-utility.html

Author

utfout was written by James Hunt <jamesodhunt@ubuntu.com>.