Overwrite last line on terminal

Question

My bash-script looks as following:

echo "Description:" while [ $finishInput -eq 0 ]; do   read tmp   desc="$desc"$'\n'"$tmp"   if [ -z "$tmp" ]; then     finishInput="1"   fi done echo -n "Maintainer:" read maintainer 

It reads to the desc var until a empty line is passed. After that, i want to read in other stuff.

When executing my current script it looks like this:

Description: Line 1 Line 2  Maintainer: 

I would like to overwrite the last empty line with the "Maintainer:".

I searched for a solution but only found suggestions which were like

echo -n "Old line" echo -e "\r new line" 

which stays on the line and overwrites it. This is not possible in my case.

Answer 1

In your example you delete the text at the same line. When you want to return to the previous line use \e[1A, and to clear that line, use \e[K:

echo 'Old line' echo -e '\e[1A\e[Knew line' 

When you want to go N lines up, use \e[<N>A