Text in Bash terminal getting overwritten! Using JS, Node.js (npms are: inquirer, console.table, and mysql)

Question

Short 10sec video of what is happening: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YZccegry36sZIPxTawGjaQ4Sexw5zGpZ/view

I have a CLI app that asks a user for a selection, then returns a response from a mysql database. The CLI app is run in node.js and prompts questions with Inquirer.

However, after returning the table of information, the next prompt overwrites the table data, making it mostly unreadable. It should appear on its own lines beneath the rest of the data, not overlap. The functions that gather and return the data are asynchronous (they must be in order to loop), but I have tried it with just a short list of standard synchronous functions for testing purposes, and the same problem exists. I have tried it with and without console.table, and the prompt still overwrites the response, as a console table or object list.

I have enabled checkwinsize in Bash with

shopt -s checkwinsize

And it still persists.

Is it Bash? Is it a problem with Inquirer?

Answer 1

I was having this issue as well. In my .then method of my prompt I was using switch and case to determine what to console log depending on the users selection. Then at the bottom I had an if statement checking to if they selected 'Finish' if they didn't I called the prompt function again, which I named 'questionUser'.

That's where I was having the issue, calling questionUser again was overriding my console logs.

What I did was I wrapped the questionUser call in a setTimeout like this:

if(data.option !== 'Finish'){
        setTimeout(() => {
            questionUser();
        }, 1000);
    }

This worked for me and allowed my console log data to not get deleted. Hopefully if anyone else is having this issue this helps, I couldn't find an answer to this specific question anywhere.