Hi Leonardo,
> Hey, thanks for the contact. That's an interesting observation. I'm
> curious -- what sort of terminal support ANSI-like attributes (color,
> bold etc.) but not the ANSI escape sequences? I.e. if I output ANSI
> directly, I'm running the risk of breaking what?
Keith's answered that already, but others include the Lear Siegler
family of ADM terminals. I used to use the ADM3a and ADM11.
$ for t in xterm adm1178; do
> (TERM=$t; tput rev; tput bold) | hd
> done
00000000 1b 5b 37 6d 1b 5b 31 6d |.[7m.[1m|
00000008
00000000 1b 47 34 1b 28 |.G4.(|
00000005
$
> > It's horrible when commands hard-code ANSI escape sequences, e.g.
> > the otherwise good dstat(1).
>
> I think it's pretty common these days, though. I took a quick peek
> and ls, grep, colordiff and git all hard-code ANSI.
ls(1) looks at LS_COLORS environment variable, possibly set up by
dircolors(1). I can easily have ls output non-ANSI escape codes.
$ LS_COLORS='lc=<lc>:rc=<rc>:no=<normal>:di=<dir>:fi=<file>' \
> ls -d /etc /etc/passwd
<lc><normal><rc><lc><dir><rc>/etc<lc><normal><rc>
<lc><file><rc>/etc/passwd<lc><normal><rc>
<lc><rc>$
ls and grep also only use colour if I request it. I don't think a man
page should output ANSI codes without regard for whether everything
downstream can cope.
Cheers,
Ralph.
