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On Thursday 05 April 2007 20:07, Tony Stohne wrote: |
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> Mick said the following on 2007-04-05 19:07: |
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> | ... |
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> | Hmm, neither less not cat give me color output. Passing --color=y to |
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> |
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> either |
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> |
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> | tells me things like: |
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> | ============================== |
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> | There is no color=y option ("less --help" for help) |
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> | ============================== |
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> | |
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> | I also tried --color but it's all still shown in black & white. How |
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> |
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> do you |
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> |
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> | pipe a file and get it to show in color? Am I missing something in |
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> | my .bashrc or elsewhere? |
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> |
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> To make less interpret color escape sequences, you need the -R option. |
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> export LESS=-R in your shell startup script and you-ll have it as |
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> default. Generally, you don't want to use less -r, which allows |
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> arbitrary control characters through to affect the terminal (which tend |
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> to create major garbage). |
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> |
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> Color is added via ANSI escape sequences, which don't work in all |
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> displays/terminals/consoles, but as an example: grep is smart enough to |
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> detect this and won't use color (even when specified) if you're sending |
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> the output via a pipeline. Otherwise, if you piped the output, eg to |
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> less, the ANSI escape sequences would send garbage to the screen. |
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> |
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> ~ If, on the other hand, that's really what you want to do (without the |
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> garbage), there's a workaround: |
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> |
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> use the --color=always to force it through and call less with the -R |
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> flag (which prints ALL RAW control characters). That way, the color |
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> codes will escape correctly and you'll page through screens of text with |
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> your matched patterns in full color: |
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> |
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> grep --color=always "regexp" the_file_you_want_to_wade_through | less -R |
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> |
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> That should do the trick :) |
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Thank you Tony, |
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That's good. It shows the regexp in colour and makes it easy to find amidst |
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the text. However, what I had in mind was many different colours, like I can |
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see e.g. in vim? Is such a thing possible with cat or less? |
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BTW, I had alias less="less -r" in my .bashrc, but changed to -R as suggested. |
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Happy Easter to All! |
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-- |
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Regards, |
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Mick |
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