Scrolling through ls output without a mouse

0.5a - Cyan Tumbleweed Plains

The earlier implementations provided with the question rely on a sequence of commands which uses tr and a set of single byte characters. As was explained in this Q&A, the utility cannot process multibyte characters such as Unicode. But leveraging those characters was quite essential in achieving the desired effect. A "solution" was provided which allows to mix the single byte and multi byte chars in a single stream for rendering. The solution developed there is presented and customized here:

Z1=$(echo -en '\xe2\x97\x98') #◘ 1
Z2=$(echo -en '\xe2\x95\x9a') #╚ 2
Z3=$(echo -en '\xe2\x95\x9c') #╜ 3
Z4=$(echo -en '\xe2\x95\x9d') #╝ 4
Z5=$(echo -en '\xe2\x95\x9e') #╞ 5
Z6=$(echo -en '\xe2\x95\x9f') #╟ 6
Z7=$(echo -en '\xe2\x96\x91') #░ 7
Z8=$(echo -en '\xe2\x96\x92') #▒ 8
Z9=$(echo -en '\xe2\x96\x93') #▓ 9
N1=$(echo -en '\xe2\x94\x80') #─ a
N2=$(echo -en '\xe2\x95\x92') #╒ b
N3=$(echo -en '\xe2\x95\x97') #╗ c
N4=$(echo -en '\xe2\x96\xb6') #▶d
N5=$(echo -en '\xe2\x94\xbc') #┼ e
N6=$(echo -en '\xe2\x94\xa4') #┤ f
N7=$(echo -en '\xe2\x95\xa1') #╡ g
Z11="$(tr -dc '123456789a' < /dev/urandom | head -c 1)" //Z11 to Z13 not
Z12="$(tr -dc '123456789a' < /dev/urandom | head -c 1)" // used here (see
Z13="$(tr -dc '123456789a' < /dev/urandom | head -c 1)" //link)

echo -en $(tr -dcs ' ;",15bdef' ' ' < /dev/urandom | head -c $(echo -en "$[$(tput cols) * $(tput lines)]") | sed -e "s/1/$(echo -en "\033[0;36m$Z1\033[0m")/g" -e "s/5/$(echo -en "\033[0;32m$Z5\033[0m")/g" -e "s/b/$(echo -en "\033[1;36m$N2\033[0m")/g" -e "s/d/$(echo -en "\033[1;36m$N4\033[0m")/g" -e "s/e/$(echo -en "\033[0;32m$N5\033[1;32m")/g" -e "s/f/$(echo -en "\033[0;36m$N7\033[1;32m")/g"); tput cup 1
                 ^set^+^chars^ to implement from pool - here 1,5,b,d,e,f... so_________________________^add the appropriate sed subprocessing units for implemented chars i.e. first one we replace "1" with the value of $Z1 and apply color at the same time, then all the chars move down the pipe to all required blocks - we selected to implement 6 chars here so we have 6 sed blocks. 

[N.B. To remove the blank space from the pattern, remove it from both sets: tr -dcs ';",15bdef' '']

PS1="\[\033[1;36m\] $(echo -en '\xe2\x96\x91')$(echo -en '\xe2\x96\x92')$(echo -en '\xe2\x96\x93')[\t]$(echo -en '\xe2\x96\x93')$(echo -en '\xe2\x96\x92')$(echo -en '\xe2\x96\x91') \[\033[7;36m\]$(echo -en '\xe2\x97\x98')$(echo -en '\xe2\x94\xbc')$(echo -en '\xe2\x94\x80')\W$(echo -en '\xe2\x94\x80')\[\033[0;36m\]$(echo -en '\xe2\x94\x80')$(echo -en '\xe2\x94\x80')$(echo -en '\xe2\x94\x80')@$(echo -en '\xe2\x96\xb6')\[\033[0;36m\]"

PROMPT_COMMAND="echo -en '\033[0;36m$(tr -dc '=' < /dev/urandom | head -c $(tput cols))\n\033[01;46m$(tr -dc '~' < /dev/urandom | head -c $(tput cols))\033[0;36m$(tr -dc '=' < /dev/urandom | head -c $(tput cols))'$(tput cuu 2)"

This implementation no longer renders per line but rather prints the whole sequence in one shot at the end of the sed processing. This appears only at login once or generally when bash is launched. Here is one such random pattern at launch (we can see two shades of green and two shades of cyan):

The screens show the result in the standard linux terminal and it works in xterm too. I've used some of those new pattern chars in the PS1 prompt whereas the PROMPT_COMMAND just takes care of the active line and its 2 line padding which use 1 byte chars.

The pattern also matches well my current distribution which calls archbey in .bashrc.:

It's in for Christmas! Cheers people :)

I am not at all convinced of this, but let's suppose for the sake of argument that you could, if you're prepared to put in enough effort, parse the output of ls reliably, even in the face of an "adversary" — someone who knows the code you wrote and is deliberately choosing filenames designed to break it.

Even if you could do that, it would still be a bad idea.

Bourne shell is not a good language. It should not be used for anything complicated, unless extreme portability is more important than any other factor (e.g. autoconf).

I claim that if you're faced with a problem where parsing the output of ls seems like the path of least resistance for a shell script, that's a strong indication that whatever you are doing is too complicated for shell and you should rewrite the entire thing in Perl or Python. Here's your last program in Python:

import os, sys
for subdir, dirs, files in os.walk("."):
    for f in dirs + files:
      ino = os.lstat(os.path.join(subdir, f)).st_ino
      sys.stdout.write("%d %s %s\n" % (ino, subdir, f))

This has no issues whatsoever with unusual characters in filenames -- the output is ambiguous in the same way the output of ls is ambiguous, but that wouldn't matter in a "real" program (as opposed to a demo like this), which would use the result of os.path.join(subdir, f) directly.

Equally important, and in stark contrast to the thing you wrote, it will still make sense six months from now, and it will be easy to modify when you need it to do something slightly different. By way of illustration, suppose you discover a need to exclude dotfiles and editor backups, and to process everything in alphabetical order by basename:

import os, sys
filelist = []
for subdir, dirs, files in os.walk("."):
    for f in dirs + files:
        if f[0] == '.' or f[-1] == '~': continue
        lstat = os.lstat(os.path.join(subdir, f))
        filelist.append((f, subdir, lstat.st_ino))

filelist.sort(key = lambda x: x[0])
for f, subdir, ino in filelist: 
   sys.stdout.write("%d %s %s\n" % (ino, subdir, f))