-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Mick said the following on 2007-04-05 19:07: | ... | Hmm, neither less not cat give me color output. Passing --color=y to either | tells me things like: | ============================== | There is no color=y option ("less --help" for help) | ============================== | | I also tried --color but it's all still shown in black & white. How do you | pipe a file and get it to show in color? Am I missing something in | my .bashrc or elsewhere?
To make less interpret color escape sequences, you need the -R option. export LESS=-R in your shell startup script and you-ll have it as default. Generally, you don't want to use less -r, which allows arbitrary control characters through to affect the terminal (which tend to create major garbage). Color is added via ANSI escape sequences, which don't work in all displays/terminals/consoles, but as an example: grep is smart enough to detect this and won't use color (even when specified) if you're sending the output via a pipeline. Otherwise, if you piped the output, eg to less, the ANSI escape sequences would send garbage to the screen. ~ If, on the other hand, that's really what you want to do (without the garbage), there's a workaround: use the --color=always to force it through and call less with the -R flag (which prints ALL RAW control characters). That way, the color codes will escape correctly and you'll page through screens of text with your matched patterns in full color: grep --color=always "regexp" the_file_you_want_to_wade_through | less -R That should do the trick :) //Regards Tony PS. Have a nice Easter everyone! -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (MingW32) iD8DBQFGFUjWJDzv6DN+QUkRArevAKDoe0VND3TXj0o0kV3KkrD7cwPmBgCfUF27 VgMOQFi+i5rwL2p0rpljZ70= =w/na -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list