bash command preserve color when piping

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Can colorized output be captured via shell redirect?

setup

In this case specifically I'm trying to preserve the colors in git status -s when piping it to another command.

Some git commands, diff for instance, and other commands like grep have an option --color=always but git status does not.

question

Is there a way to pipe or capture the output of a command and make it think it is outputting to the xterm shell so it doesn't automatically disable colors?

I would say the easiest way is to pass a configuration paramter like: git -c 'color.ui=always' status | more -R — joynes, Mar 27 '14 at 16:21

score 34 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 04 '11 at 11:02

34

Here's a script snippet using the colorized output of ls as an example (on Mac OS X 10.6).

# no colored ls output if stdout is a pipe (and not a tty)
ls -G /
ls -G / | cat
script -q /dev/null ls -G / | tr -d '\r' | cat

# write output of script command to a variable
var="$(script -q /dev/null ls -G / | tr -d '\r' | cat)"
echo "$var"

answered Oct 04 '11 at 11:02

vego

364
2
2

2

Isn't this a lot easier? http://serverfault.com/a/26521/50948 – paradroid Apr 09 '14 at 11:00
3

@paradroid - Easier for "ls", but some programs might not have an option to force coloring. – Adam S Nov 07 '14 at 18:50
[UUOC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_(Unix)#Useless_use_of_cat)? – ford Nov 19 '14 at 14:58
Using your example, how would I save the return code(`$?`) of `ls -G`? – Lux Aug 20 '16 at 23:22
The `-e` option of script makes the return code carry over. – Aiden Woodruff Mar 08 '19 at 03:45
Why do you use `tr -d '\r'` – theonlygusti Oct 07 '20 at 12:11

score 7 · Answer 2 · edited Aug 03 '17 at 13:42

7

Most commands that do print out those color codes explicitly check if stdout/stderr is a tty (using the isatty function).

If you want to preserve the color codes, you can run it within a terminal emulator like screen or the direct logger script, saving the output to a file.

edited Aug 03 '17 at 13:42

czerny

15,090
14
68
96

answered Oct 03 '11 at 22:31

Foo Bah

25,660
5
55
79

can the `script` command be told to write to a variable? – rennat Oct 03 '11 at 22:52
@rennat you can save to a temporary file and then read from the file into a variable. – Foo Bah Oct 03 '11 at 22:53

bash command preserve color when piping

setup

question

2 Answers2

Linked