Is it possible to "alias" all commands to append --color? Or instead have it automatically activated for every program that supports it?
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See also stackoverflow.com/questions/563500/…Philip Durbin– Philip Durbin2009-05-03 02:08:20 +00:00Commented May 3, 2009 at 2:08
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4 Answers
You should be careful with this, especially when chaining invocations.
grep --color=yes 'foo' bar.txt | less #leads to weird ANSI stuff in output
grep --color=yes 'foo' bar.txt | less -R #binary codes interpreted as colors
Basically, this can screw up pipelining...I'd recommend aliasing things with colorized output to separate commands to avoid doing "cmd | myprog" and getting weird results due to embedded ANSI.
1 Comment
Adam Rosenfield
Some commands (such as grep) support '--color=auto' which will colorize the output if and only if stdout is a terminal. If stdout is a pipe, they will not colorize.
How would the shell know automatically which programs support the --color option? You'd have to give it a list, and as long as you're going to do that you might as well just give it a list of alias commands to run. I suppose it could be done programmatically by something like this (in bash):
for cmd in ls blah foo; do
alias "$cmd=$cmd --color"
done
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There are really very few programs that support the --color option, and they aren't actually written by a single organization. Thus, they don't refer to a central location for their options. Heck, the don't even have a uniform argument set, so just the --color option to the end of every command would probably cause a lot of damage!
I'm afraid you'd have to alias each and one. For example, for ls:
alias ls='ls --color'
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instead of trying to change each command
why not just change the way your console displays colors
1 Comment
Rob Kennedy
Change the console how? To make it magically display colors for text that the command didn't mark up?
