How to get the cursor position in bash ?

Posted by Julien Nicoulaud on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Julien Nicoulaud
Published on 2010-04-04T16:16:58Z Indexed on 2010/04/04 16:23 UTC
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bash

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cursor

In a bash script, I want to get the cursor column in a variable. It looks like using the ANSI escape code {ESC}[6n is the only way to get it, for example the following way:

# Query the cursor position
echo -en '\033[6n'

# Read it to a variable
read -d R CURCOL

# Extract the column from the variable
CURCOL="${CURCOL##*;}"

# We have the column in the variable
echo $CURCOL

Unfortunately, this prints characters to the standard output and I want to do it silently. Besides, this is not very portable...

Is there a pure-bash way to achieve this ?

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