Whitespace concatenation in Bash
The problem may be because $empty_space has only spaces. Then, to output them you have to surround it in double quotes:
echo "${empty_space}some_other_thing"You can try more interesting output with printf for example to obtain several spaces. For instance, to write 20 spaces:
v=`printf '%20s' ' '`
The strings can be created using parameter substitution.The substitution ${str:offset:length} returns a substring of str :
space80=' 'hash80='################################################################################'progress_bar=${hash80:0:$progress_length-$begin+1}empty_space=${space80:0:$end-$middle+1}echo -n "$empty_space$progress_bar"
I understand your problem as I had exactly the same.
My solution was to concatenate a temporary character instead of a whitespace, say for example ☼, and then, at the end, replace all their occurences with sed by a whitespace :
echo $myString | sed 's/☼/ /g'I hope it will help you !