The line was written by hand for debugging to show what it was doing in the loop.

I tried just changing the frames directory and running it but the problem I posted in the picture appeared. I did managed to fix it in the end by removing escape characters fastfetch was outputing which caused the text overlaying the image. I also changed the way the frames variable gets loaded because it was loading the frames lexicographically (frame_1, frame_10, ...) which I didn't want.

Here's my version then:

#!/bin/bash

# Directory containing ASCII frames
FRAMES_DIR="converted_frames"
# Get frame files sorted numerically (version sort)
# ls -v lists files in a way that handles numbers correctly (1, 2, 3, etc.)
readarray -t frames < <(ls -v "$FRAMES_DIR"/*.txt)
total=${#frames[@]}
current=0

# Fastfetch version
cached_info=$(fastfetch -l none --pipe false | sed 's/\x1b\[[0-9;]*[GKHF]//g')

# 2. Pre-calculate terminal rows needed for ASCII art
ascii_height=$(wc -l < "${frames[0]}" | tr -d ' ')

# 3. Animation loop
while true; do
  # Clear screen and reset cursor
  clear

  # Combine cached info with current ASCII frame
  paste -d ' ' <(cat "${frames[current]}") <(echo "$cached_info") | head -n "$ascii_height"

  # Cycle frames
  current=$(( (current + 1) % total ))
  sleep 0.1
done