Pipe output to stdout and file, but strip off color codes for file writes

Question

I have a command that is constantly running and prints a log in different colors to the terminal. And I'd like to redirect that commands output to a file, but also keep in the terminal.

So far this can simply be done with tee as in:

echo -e "\033[0;31mHello world\033[0m" 2>&1 | tee ./output.txt

But here comes the tricky part:

I don't want the color codes to appear in the file. And since my command runs over multiple hours at a time it can't be removed after the command has been executed, but it has to be removed while the command is still running.

If I run:

echo -e "\033[0;31mHello world\033[0m" 2>&1 | tee ./output.txt | sed -r "s/\x1B\[([0-9]{1,2}(;[0-9]{1,2})?)?[mGK]//g"

then it removes the color for the terminal prints, but the color codes are still printed to the output file, so I kind of need to reverse this.

Any ideas how this could be done?

Why don't you put the `sed` command before the `tee` command? — PlasmaBinturong, Sep 25 '19 at 10:48
Because I would lose the colors entirely. As I said, I still want the colors for the prints on the terminal, I just want to remove them for the file writes. — Forivin, Sep 25 '19 at 10:52
Did you see this answer? https://stackoverflow.com/a/2342841/3508655 — JoseLinares, Sep 25 '19 at 10:55
@Forivin Aah alright, sorry. For the record, what is the true command you are using? Doesn't it have an option to redirect logs to a file? — PlasmaBinturong, Sep 25 '19 at 10:55
I'd just do something like: `echo -e "\033[0;31mHello world\033[0m" | tee /dev/tty | sed -r "s/\x1B\[([0-9]{1,2}(;[0-9]{1,2})?)?[mGK]//g" >output.txt` — Léa Gris, Sep 25 '19 at 11:06

Pipe output to stdout and file, but strip off color codes for file writes

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