Hi,
Can anyone help me find out how to highlilght certain words in unix. I know of a command "smso" and it usage also. But, i am unable to recall, that with a combination of some control characters, we can also highlight text in unix. This works on HP-UX or SVR4.
Doesn anyone use them in their .profile files or shell scripts to highlight a particular point.

Thanks..

I use:

export BOLD=$(tput bold)
export REV=$(tput rev)
export CLEAR=$(tput sgr0)
export HOSTNAME=$(hostname)
PS1="${BOLD}${HOSTNAME} ${CLEAR}\${PWD}: "

However the results will depend on the terminal application. e.g. Hummingbird HostExplorer lets you assign colours to bold, underline etc, so I have separate definitions set up for dev and production servers with different coloured prompts.

If what you are looking for is the ANSI escape sequences, try this:

tput bold > bold

What you will see in the file is something like:

^[[1m

If you want to type the sting into a file, use v which will create the ^[ and then type in [1m and you will have the sequence. You can see other sequences such as tput sgr0 in the same manner and then use them in a print statement. William Robertson's suggestion is how I do it and is actually the best way, in my opinion.

Many Many thanks to William & Jerry too...

Helped a great deal......... :-)

That v in my response was a CNTL v then Esc. I made the mistake of putting the CNTL and the Esc between angle brackets which causes them not to appear in the posting.