The ultimate collection of loading animations for Bash

Ready-to-use loading animations in ASCII and UTF-8 for easy integration into your Bash scripts.

Have an idea for a nice-looking animation? Please help expand the collection!

⚠ Important note: do not copy the raw script file from your browser or you will have broken animations, as the non-breaking spaces will be converted into regular spaces.

Instead, use one of the following methods to retrieve the script:

git clone https://github.com/Silejonu/bash_loading_animations

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Silejonu/bash_loading_animations/main/bash_loading_animations.sh
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Silejonu/bash_loading_animations/main/bash_loading_animations.demo

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Silejonu/bash_loading_animations/main/bash_loading_animations.sh
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Silejonu/bash_loading_animations/main/bash_loading_animations.demo

Run the provided script bash_loading_animations.demo to quickly visualise the available animations.

Add support for loading animations to your script

Put these lines at the top of your script:

# Load in the functions and animations
source /path/to/bash_loading_animations.sh
# Run BLA::stop_loading_animation if the script is interrupted
trap BLA::stop_loading_animation SIGINT

Don't forget to replace /path/to/bash_loading_animations.sh with the appropriate filepath.

Show a loading animation for foo

Show a loading animation for the command foo:

BLA::start_loading_animation "${BLA_name_of_the_animation[@]}"
foo
BLA::stop_loading_animation

If foo prints some output in the terminal, you may want to add:

foo 1> /dev/null # hide standard output
# or
foo 2> /dev/null # hide error messages
# or
foo &> /dev/null # hide all output

Some of the animations have been adapted from https://github.com/sindresorhus/cli-spinners.