How do you delete characters in a shell script?

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I have printed a character on the screen using a shell script. I want to move that character one space to the left. I have tried moving the cursor to the top left corner of the screen and printing a backspace, like this:

tput cup 1 1;
printf "\b";

The backspace supposedly deletes the character under the cursor. But it won't do anything for me.

Is there any other way to do this?

2 
tput cup 0 0

Should this not be?

tput cup 0 1
3

Yeah, I know. That doesn't really help, though.

4

Rethink.
Move the cursor back with \b , output a space character, move the cursor back with \b .

printf "line1"
printf "\b \b"
read junk
5

Backspace is not deleting any character, it just moves the cursor one position to the left. To erase a character, overwrite it with a space.

6

If you use same tput more than once with some constant argument(s) then do tput once and save output.
After that use variable.

lear
cat <<EOF
=========================================================
Screen test


EOF
loc0_0=$(tput cup 0 0)
bold=$(tput  smso)
boldoff=$(tput rmso)
save_loc=$(tput sc)
ret_loc=$(tput rc)

# after this init, use variable
echo "${bold}BoldText${boldoff} and not so bold"
echo -e "(Look line 1) Ask here:${save_loc}${loc0_0}LOCATION 0,0 IS HERE ***************${ret_loc}\c"
read answer
echo "${save_loc}${loc0_0}Your answer:$answer   ${ret_loc}"
echo