Bash. infinite loop showing a counter and more info

I have a script which generates dinamically another bash script. In this heredoc script there is an infinite loop showing a counter (this works!):

date1=`date +%s`
while true; do echo -ne "$(date -u --date @$((`date +%s` - $date1)) +%H:%M:%S)\r";
done

This loop is working fine if you put only this. The problem is I need to show not only the counter. More info is needed (some static data). I'll put my NOT working code:

#!/bin/bash
dir="/tmp/"
my_file="generatedscript.sh"
rm -rf "$dir$my_file" > /dev/null 2>&1
exec 3>"$dir$my_file"
cat >&3 <<-'EOF' #!/bin/bash date1=`date +%s` while true; do echo -ne "Info\n" # this is the damned line, if you remove it the counter works fine echo -ne "Time counter: $(date -u --date @$((`date +%s` - $date1)) +%H:%M:%S)\r"; done
EOF
exec 3>&-
xterm -hold -geometry 78x25+0+0 -T "Testing" -e "bash \"$dir$my_file\"" > /dev/null 2>&1 &

This shows the xterm window with a lot of lines and the Info line is overlapped with the "Time" word of other line. I want to show Info line separately from the Time counter line and the counter running... and only once!

If you remove the line echo -ne "Info\n" The counter is showing ok, running and only once... how can put another different line (echo with the info) above this and as a fixed line without repetition? is possible? any idea of how to reach this? Thank you.

1 Answer

Just move the INFO line out of the loop. I usually prefer to put the carriage return at the start of the line. Neither -n or -e is portable, so I usually prefer printf for all but the simplest uses of echo.

dir="/tmp/"
my_file="generatedscript.sh"
script="$tmp/$my_file"
cat > "$script" <<'EOF'
echo INFO
date1=$(date +%s)
while true; do now=$(date +%s) delta=$((now - date1)) printf '\rTime counter: %s' "$(date -u --date "$delta" +%H:%M:%S)"
done
EOF
chmod +x 500 "$tmp/$my_file"
xterm -hold -geometry 78x25+0+0 -T "Testing" -e "$script" > /dev/null